DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
DOSTOEVSKY DEBUNKS THE MENTAL CAPACITY AND
INSANE DELUSION DOCTRINES
AMY D. RONNER*
I. INTRODUCTION
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s1 novel, The Double, Mr. Golyadkin, a civil
servant, meets his identical twin:
Sitting on his bed, also wearing a hat and coat, smiling
slightly, puckering up his eyes and tipping him a friendly
nod, was the stranger. Mr. Golyadkin wanted to scream,
but could not—wanted to make some form of protest, but
lacked the power. His hair stood on end, and he collapsed
senseless with horror on the spot. And small wonder. He
had fully recognized his friend of the night. It was none
other than himself—Mr. Golyadkin . . . Another Mr.
Copyright © 2012, Amy D. Ronner.
*
Professor of Law, St. Thomas University School of Law. J.D., 1985, University of
Miami; Ph.D. (English Language and Literature), 1980, University of Michigan; M.A.,
1976, University of Michigan; B.A., 1975, Beloit College. Professor Ronner, the author of
LAW, LITERATURE, AND THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE (2010), lectured at the International
Dostoevsky Conference in Naples, Italy in 2010. The author would like to dedicate her
article to a real treasure, Deborah A. Martinsen, Ph.D., President of the International
Dostoevsky Society, Associate Dean of Alumni Education, and Adjunct Associate
Professor of Slavic Studies, Columbia University. Doctor Martinsen is an inspiration, a
friend, and a mentor. The author especially thanks her husband, Michael P. Pacin, M.D. for
his unconditional love, encouragement, and patience. Further, she thanks her talented and
diligent research assistant, A. Starkey De Soto; law library guru, Professor Roy Balleste;
and faculty assistant, Mariela Torres, who has been her “right arm” for nearly two decades.
1
Because Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works have been translated from Russian to English,
his name and his characters’ names are spelled differently among the various translations.
This article refers to the author as “Dostoevsky,” however other acceptable spellings
include “Dostoevskij” and “Dostoyevsky.” These alternates are displayed in the other
sources referenced in this article. All variations refer to the same author. Further, this
article refers to the main character as “Golyadkin,” while others translate his name to
“Goljadkin.” Both are acceptable and refer to the same character.
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Golyadkin, but exactly the same as him . . . It was, in
short, his double . . . [.]2
The Double, only the twenty-four year old Russian genius’s second
published work,3 was written during Dostoevsky’s pre-Siberian period, a
time when he was shaping his own “personal and literary identity.”4
Although the author himself was not satisfied with The Double5—one of
the great but lesser known Russian novels—it dispatches a timeless
message that not only speaks to today’s lawyers, judges, and legal scholars,
but could also conceivably transform traditional will and trust doctrines.
Although scholarship on Dostoevsky and the law is not new, most of it
focuses on the post-Siberian period in which the author created some of his
most famous masterpieces, such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot,
Demons, and Brothers Karamazov.6 Siberia was the turning point in
2
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE DOUBLE (George Bird trans., 1958) (1846), reprinted in
GREAT SHORT WORKS OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, 44 (1st Perennial Classics ed. 2004).
3
Ronald Hingley, Introduction to GREAT SHORT WORKS OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, at ix
(1st Perennial Classics ed. 2004).
4
Richard J. Rosenthal, Dostoevsky’s Experiment with Projective Mechanisms and the
Theft of Identity in The Double, in 31 RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS 59, 59
(Daniel Rancour-Laferriere ed., 1989).
5
Dimitri Chizhevsky, The Theme of the Double in Dostoevsky, in DOSTOEVSKY: A
COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS 112 (1965) (discussing Dostoevsky’s disappointment with
the form of the story); JOHN JONES, DOSTOEVSKY 83, 83–84 (1983) (discussing the author’s
feelings of failure about the story); David Gasperetti, The Double: Dostoevskij’s SelfEffacing Narrative, 33 SLAVIC & E. EUR. J. 217, 217–18 (1989) (analyzing Dostoevsky’s
“grave doubts” about the novel); Lonny Roy Harrison, Duality and the Problem of Moral
Self-Awareness in Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik (The Double), 188–89 (2008) (unpublished Ph.D
thesis, University of Toronto) (on file with author) (explaining that some of Dostoevsky’s
discontent with the novel and desire to rework it was due to the critics’ unflattering
assessments).
6
See, e.g., AMY D. RONNER, LAW, LITERATURE, AND THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE 89–
149 (2010) (analyzing the therapeutic jurisprudence confession in Crime and Punishment);
RICHARD H. WEISBERG, THE FAILURE OF THE WORD 48–49 (1984) (evaluating primarily
Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment as lawyer and officer of the court); Vera
Bergelson, Crimes and Defenses of Rodion Raskolnikov, 85 KY. L.J. 919, 921 (1997)
(attempting “to read Crime and Punishment and the Model Penal Code together, conducting
a hypothetical ‘retrial’ of Rodion Raskolnikov”); William Burnham, The Legal Context and
Contributions of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, 100 MICH. L. REV. 1227, 1232
(2002) (analyzing the novel through examining the legal system and the rules of evidence
(continued)
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Dostoevsky’s career.7 Already a known novelist, Dostoevsky was arrested,
tried, and sentenced to death for treason in 1849.8 After about eight
months in prison, officials led him and others into a public square and tied
them to execution posts before a firing squad.9 Just before discharging
their shots, the soldiers received a halt command.10 Thus, by order of
Nicholas I, the Russian novelist and fellow prisoners were spared and their
death sentences commuted to terms of hard labor and exile in Siberia.11
After serving his term, Dostoevsky was permitted to return to St.
existing at the time); Robert F. Cochran, Jr., Crime, Confession, and the Counselor-At-Law:
Lessons from Dostoyevsky, 35 HOUS. L. REV. 327, 358–59 (1998) (exploring the
psychological and legal effects of confession on various characters, including Raskolnikov
in Crime and Punishment); Jeanne Gaakeer, “The Art to Find the Mind’s Construction in
the Face,” Lombroso’s Criminal Anthropology and Literature: The Example of Zola,
Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, 26 CARDOZO L. REV. 2345, 2346 (2005) (exploring Cesare
Lombroso’s view that Dostoevsky “was a criminal anthropologist who, in the character of
Raskolnikov . . . depicted a fine specimen of the occasional criminal”).
7
See Burnham, supra note 6, at 1228 (discussing the significance of this period in
Dostoevsky’s life); cf. JOSEPH FRANK, DOSTOYEVSKY: THE MIRACULOUS YEARS 1865–1871,
3 (1995) (describing the period following exile as “the most remarkable in Dostoevsky’s
career . . . .”).
8
Burnham, supra note 6, at 1228; RONNER, supra note 6, at 89–90 (discussing
Dostoevsky’s experience with the Russian criminal justice system). See also Ignat Avsey,
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Life, in FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, WINTER NOTES ON SUMMER
IMPRESSIONS 117, 120–21 (Kyril Fitzlyon trans., One-World Classics 2008) (describing
what precipitated Dostoevsky’s arrest and sentencing—namely, his joining of a “special
secret society,” which was “organized by the most radical member of the Petrashevsky
Circle,” named after “the revolutionary and utopian socialist, Mikhail Petrashevsky”).
9
Burnham, supra note 6, at 1228.
10
In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin describes “a man . . . once taken up with
others to the scaffold, and the death sentence by firing squad was read out to him, for a
political offence” and “[s]ome twenty minutes later a reprieve was read out to him, and a
different degree of punishment was fixed, but in the interval between the two sentences,
twenty minutes, or at least quarter of an hour, he lived in the unquestionable conviction that
in a few minutes’ time he would face sudden death.” FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE IDIOT
70–71 (David McDuff trans., Penguin Books 2004) (1868).
11
Burnham, supra note 6, at 1228.
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Petersburg where, in the wake of the traumatic ordeal, he would create
some of his finest work.12
Dostoevsky was not a lawyer and lacked formal legal training.13
However, his later novels—particularly Crime and Punishment, The House
of the Dead, and Brothers Karamazov—display an uncanny insight not
only into the law and the workings of the justice system but also into the
very psyche of individuals who commit crimes.14 Even before Siberia,
Dostoevsky—who suffered from nervous attacks, seizures, and
hallucinations—acquired an expertise in mental illness and instability.15
Psychological nuggets of wisdom surface in The Double, an important but
sadly underrated novel.16
The Double is an uncomfortable story, not only because it forces
readers to experience the kind of living hell that most readers hope to avoid
12
See FRANK, supra note 7, at 3; JONES, supra note 5, at 3–4 (stating that “the young
Socialist, the hospital doctor’s son who wrote about life in Petersburg’s attics and kitchens
and those partitioned-off spaces they called corners, is not the man we are interested in,”
and instead, “we are waiting . . . for him to get sent to Siberia so he can return in middle age
and give the world Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers
Karamazov”); RONNER, supra note 6, at 89–90.
13
Burnham, supra note 6, at 1227.
14
See David McDuff, Translator’s Introduction to FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE HOUSE
OF THE DEAD 7 (David McDuff trans., Penguin Books 2003) (1861) (noting that while in
prison, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail, “I had got to know something of the
convict population back in Tobolsk; here in Omsk I was to live for four years in close
proximity to it. These men were coarse, irritable and malicious”); Burnham, supra note 6,
at 1228–29 (“[T]he experience in Siberia threw [Dostoevsky] together for several years
with a wide variety of ordinary and political offenders. This experience undoubtedly
informed him well and piqued his curiosity about the nature of both crime and its
punishment.”).
15
See JONES, supra note 5, at 107 (discussing how Dostoevsky “showed signs of being
really ill” and stating that “the main reason why experts still argue about the origins of his
epilepsy is that his own letters . . . and accounts of him by others, are strewn with references
to nervous attacks spasms, seizures, fits, faintings, hallucinations”); Lawrence Kohlberg,
Psychological Analysis and Literary Form: A Study of the Doubles in Dostoyevsky, 92
DAEDALUS 345, 354 (1963) (discussing the potential effects of Dostoevsky’s severe
epilepsy).
16
See Chizhevsky, supra note 5, at 112. Despite Dostoevsky's friends' opinion that The
Double was “a work of genius,” the story “received rather unfavorable criticism, and until
recently was considered an unoriginal work.” Id.
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but also because its thesis is something most people prefer to ignore.
Despite the many debates over this enigmatic novel, commentators and
scholars tend to concede that with respect to the protagonist (Golyadkin),
they are never quite sure what is really happening and what is mere
hallucination.17 Therefore, there is one big question: Does Golyadkin
really have a double?18 Masterfully conjuring uncertainty, Dostoevsky
leaves readers with an unquenched thirst for an answer.
Although The Double appears to have nothing to do with the law of
wills and trusts and has not been redacted into even a note in the popular
Dukeminier, Sitkoff, and Lindgren case book,19 it should claim an entire
chapter on the mental capacity doctrine. The Double debunks, or at least
sheds doubt on, basic mental capacity and insane delusion doctrines. This
article, divided into four parts, explores Dostoevsky’s proposition that in
17
See, e.g., Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 225 (“The Double completely upsets normal
reading strategies. . . . [E]ach turn of the page leaves [the reader] more and more confused
as to what, if anything, has really taken place.”); Rosenthal, supra note 4, at 78 (discussing
the confusion in The Double about “what is real and what is not”); Nikolaj S. Trubeckoj,
The Style of “Poor Folk” and “The Double”, 7 AM. SLAVIC & E. EUR. REV. 150, 163 (1948)
(“Real happenings and hallucinations are so mixed that one can no longer separate the two,
cannot tell what really happened or what took place in the sick mind of [Golyadkin].”).
18
There are scholars who suggest that the Double exists partially or solely in
Golyadkin’s consciousness. See, e.g., JONES, supra note 5, at 82–83 (“As the novel
proceeds and ‘our hero’ and the Double sometimes become Messrs Golyadkin Senior and
Junior respectively, Dostoevsky can be felt nudging [the reader] toward[] the conclusion
that the two are also one and that the pinching and prodding register the pains of
consciousness.”); Chizhevsky, supra note 5, at 115 (describing the Double as a “delusion”
that “entered Golyadkin’s soul”); Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 222 (suggesting the possibility
that the Double, along with everything else in the novel is all a dream or the result of
Golyadkin’s “feverish imagination”); Kohlberg, supra note 15, at 350 (“[Dostoevsky]
intended . . . [the Double] to be a hallucination representing the assertive, shameless
impulses which first ‘propelled’ Golyadkin I into his patron’s ballroom . . . .”). Others
believe that the Double is objectively real. See, e.g., Harrison, supra note 5, at 121 (“The
authenticity of the double is never called into question. All secondary characters
acknowledge the presence of both Golyadkins.”); Hingley, supra note 3, at ix (“[T]he
second Golyadkin . . . is treated entirely as a matter of course in the office where both
Golyadkins work; no one is inclined to regard this [as] astonishing and impossible.”).
19
JESSE DUKEMINIER, ROBERT H. SITKOFF, & JAMES LINDGREN, WILLS, TRUSTS, AND
ESTATES (8th ed. 2009).
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many instances lawyers (or all mere mortals) are incapable of determining
unsound mind and insane delusion.
Although the mental capacity concept arises in diverse areas of law,
Part II focuses on wills and trusts, partly because it is manageable and
partly because it boasts of having a sacrosanct policy in favor of
testamentary freedom.20 Under that policy, aiming to protect individuals’
ability to control the disposition of their property upon death, courts are
commanded not to impose their morals, biases, or preconceptions on wills
or trusts.21 Courts are instructed to respect the testator’s judgment and
refrain from either redoing a will or trust or supplanting it with one of their
own.22
Despite the stronghold of testamentary freedom, some courts have
limited or eradicated a decedent’s ability to direct the disposition of
property upon death.23 One instance is where contestants successfully
20
See Jane B. Baron, Empathy, Subjectivity, and Testamentary Capacity, 24 SAN DIEGO
L. REV. 1043, 1043 (1987) (“The law of wills . . . is premised on the importance of
effectuating a person’s wishes as to the disposition of his or her property after death.
Courts may not judge the wisdom of those wishes because the testator’s ends are personal
and individual to him or her alone.”); Susanna L. Blumenthal, The Deviance of the Will:
Policing the Bounds of Testamentary Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America, 119 HARV.
L. REV. 959, 966–76 (2006) (discussing the history of testamentary freedom from the
Roman Republic to the present); Bradley E.S. Fogel, The Completely Insane Law of Partial
Insanity: The Impact of Monomania on Testamentary Capacity, 42 REAL PROP. PROB. & TR.
J. 67, 72 (2007) (“Testamentary freedom—the ability of a decedent to control the
disposition of his property at death—is a fundamental tenet of American law.”); Ashbel G.
Gulliver & Catherine J. Tilson, Classification of Gratuitous Transfers, 51 YALE L.J. 1, 2
(1941) (“One fundamental proposition is that, under a legal system recognizing the
individualistic institution of private property and granting to the owner the power to
determine his successors in ownership, the general philosophy of the courts should favor
giving effect to an intentional exercise of that power.”); John H. Langbein, Substantial
Compliance with the Wills Act, 88 HARV. L. REV. 489, 491 (1975) (“The first principle of
the law of wills is freedom of testation.”); Melanie B. Leslie, The Myth of Testamentary
Freedom, 38 ARIZ. L. REV. 235, 235 (1996) (“Courts and scholars often treat freedom of
testation as if it were a fundamental tenet of [the] liberal legal tradition.”).
21
See Baron, supra note 20, at 1043 (“Courts may not judge the wisdom of those
[testamentary] wishes.”).
22
Id. (noting “the importance of effectuating a person’s wishes”).
23
There are various limitations on testamentary freedom. See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF &
LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 469–539. For example, elective share statutes prohibit
(continued)
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argue lack of mental capacity, using a doctrine called “insane delusion” or
“monomania” to invalidate wills that either omit them entirely or slight
them as beneficiaries.24 While some commentators snipe at these
doctrines, the mental capacity rule endures and remains indelibly ingrained
in the law.25 Although in wills law sound mind and insane delusion are
testators from disinheriting their spouses and under certain circumstances, and
pretermission statutes bar testators from disinheriting children. Id. at 476. See also Baron,
supra note 20, at 1046 (discussing the “obvious and important limitations on the freedom
granted the testator” which are “regulatory in purpose and effect” and “are designed not to
effectuate private intent, but to defeat it in furtherance of explicitly identified social goals”).
24
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 168–79 (exploring the
insane delusion doctrine); Baron, supra note 20, at 1055–56 (discussing the sound mind and
insane delusion doctrines); Blumenthal, supra note 20, at 979 (discussing “monomania”);
Fogel, supra note 20, at 102–11 (criticizing the doctrine of monomania or insane delusion,
which permits a court to invalidate a will). But see infra notes 33 and 34 and accompanying
text (discussing attempts to harmonize mental capacity and insane delusion doctrines with
testamentary freedom). Wills may be challenged on other grounds, including failure to
satisfy state statutory requirements. Lawrence A. Frolik, The Biological Roots of the Undue
Influence Doctrine: What’s Love Got to Do with It?, 57 U. PITT. L. REV. 841, 847 (1966)
(“Most fundamentally, a will can be challenged as being invalid because it does not meet
the statutory technical requirements.”). See also DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra
note 19, at 223–85 (exploring will formalities and forms, all of which may form the basis
for a challenge). Wills can be challenged on the grounds of fraud, mistake, duress, lack of
testamentary capacity, and undue influence. Id. at 159–67 (lack of mental capacity), 180–
89 (undue influence), 207–15 (fraud and duress), 335–57 (mistaken or ambiguous language
in wills). See also infra Part II (analyzing sound mind and insane delusion case law).
25
Several scholars have pointed out flaws in decisions based on the insane delusion
doctrine and other challenges lodged in will contests. See, e.g., Pamela Champine,
Expertise and Instinct in the Assessment of Testamentary Capacity, 51 VILL. L. REV. 25, 49
(2006) (discussing how some courts “identify whether the testator had the capability of
exercising the requisite judgment to make a will . . . [by] examin[ing] the content of the will
that the testator’s judgment produced,” which is “associated with the policy of protecting
the testator’s family rather than fairness per se, because it is the closest family members
who most typically will benefit from a successful will contest”); Fogel, supra note 20, at
70–71 (arguing that the “standards for monomania . . . provide fact-finders—both judges
and juries—with significant leeway to express their biases” and that “[g]enerally, these
biases run in favor of traditional dispositive schemes, such as leaving property only to close
family and treating all children equally”); Milton D. Green, Proof of Mental Incompetency
and the Unexpressed Major Premise, 53 YALE L. J. 271, 278–79 (1944) (discussing cases in
(continued)
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legal constructs, this article, borrowing from the psychiatric definitions of
“bizarre” and “non-bizarre,” cordons the legal constructs to Dostoevsky’s
message in The Double.26
Shifting from law to literature, Part III summarizes The Double and the
debate over not only the novel’s meaning but also Golyadkin’s mental
condition. This part suggests that the controversy belies the fact that in
The Double, readers cannot ascertain what is real and what is hallucination.
Dostoevsky intentionally keeps his readers in limbo, leaving them to
wonder if anything really happens to his hero Golyadkin. Dostoevsky thus
compels his readers to surrender to what he suggests is an exercise in
futility: the quest to discern a tidy demarcation between reality and
delusion.
Linking Dostoevsky’s thesis to current mental capacity doctrines, Part
III also suggests that Golyadkin, like many testators, would baffle courts if
his psyche were under the will-contest microscope. Moreover, it seeks to
show that the uncertainty in The Double resembles the disquieting
dubiousness of will contests, particularly in litigation in which individuals
are alleged to have non-bizarre delusions. This part does more than just
complain. It takes a stab at a solution, proposing the sort of doctrinal
revamping which would heed Dostoevsky’s wise admonition.
Part IV concludes by revisiting the one (or two) Golyadkin(s), who
discloses the most deleterious effect of current capacity law. This
ultimately demonstrates why it is so crucial to consider making a change.
II. TESTAMENTARY FREEDOM AND THE MENTAL CAPACITY
DOCTRINE
Our legal system, based on the individualistic institution of private
property, empowers property owners to determine their successors in
ownership.27 At least in theory, testamentary freedom is sacrosanct; courts
are told to give effect to the intent of decedents who dispose of property by
will or will substitute.28 Courts are commanded not to impose their morals,
which courts validated wills even when testators lacked mental capacity because the courts
approved of the wills and found their contents to be reasonable); Leslie, supra note 20, at
236 (pointing out that will contest doctrines can end up defeating testamentary freedom
when estate plans do not adhere to what courts feel is the normative disposition).
26
See infra Part II.B (defining “bizarre” and “non-bizarre”).
27
See Baron, supra note 20, at 1043; Blumenthal, supra note 20, at 975; infra Part II
(discussing the theory and policies underlying testamentary freedom).
28
Baron, supra note 20, at 1043.
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
203
biases, or preconceptions on wills.29 Instead, courts are ordered to honor
the testator’s judgment and refrain from either rewriting a will or
substituting it with their own.30
Despite such apotheosis of freedom of testation (often denominated the
“fundamental tenet of [the] liberal legal tradition”), the system has limited
a decedent’s ability to direct the disposition of property upon death.31
Contestants can avail themselves of lack of mental capacity or insane
delusion to invalidate wills that either omit them entirely or diminish their
shares as beneficiaries.32 The law, straining to harmonize the mental
capacity requirement with testamentary freedom, implies that when an
unsound mind or delusions affect wills, the wills do not reflect, and in fact
frustrate, true intent.33 Thus, in the name of testamentary freedom courts
find and then effectuate what should have been the testator’s true intent if
the testator had not been mentally infirm or deluded.34 Too often such
rationalization is a lie and the court destroys a will to replace it with one of
its own.35
29
Id. at 1049; Leslie, supra note 20, at 235.
See Baron, supra note 20, at 1057.
31
Leslie, supra note 20, at 235.
32
Frolik, supra note 24, at 848–49.
33
See Baron, supra note 20, at 1048 (discussing how the mental capacity doctrine “can
be understood [as] guarantee[ing] that the testator is capable of forming the intent which the
law is designed to protect,” and how that “perspective illustrates the individualism of wills
law . . . [which] ensures that the wishes appearing in the will ‘truly’ are the testator’s own”);
Frolik, supra note 24, at 849–50 (“[C]ourts are justified in disallowing a will that reflects a
serious misappreciation of reality since the delusion has caused an outcome that is
inconsistent with the testator’s true intent (that is, what would have been the intent but for
the insane delusion).”).
34
Fogel, supra note 20, at 75 n.45 (“Of course, if the testator did not have capacity
when he executed the will, it is unclear whether the purported will is an accurate statement
of the testator’s testamentary intent,” arguably allowing a court to reject a will “out of
respect for testamentary freedom”). But see id. at 74–75 (“To some extent, the requirement
of testamentary capacity inherently conflicts with respect for testamentary freedom” and
“[w]hen a court rejects a will, the court is failing to implement the testator’s desires as
expressed in the purported will”); Leslie, supra note 20, at 236 (questioning whether courts
truly value testamentary freedom and showing how courts tend to manipulate doctrines to
ensure that estates fit their normative values).
35
See infra Part II.B.2.a (discussing how courts can be motivated by bias to invalidate
wills).
30
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Other policies reside in the mental capacity requisite. The sound mind
rule serves to protect the family.36 When relatives or children bestow
resources, love, and comfort on a declining testator, the law impliedly
reciprocates with remuneration.37 Further, the mental capacity rule aims to
give testators peace of mind that their wishes will be honored if they try to
undo their will or trust after their mental condition deteriorates.38
Moreover, the testamentary capacity doctrine recognizes that the elderly,
especially the senile or incompetent, can be vulnerable to unscrupulous
people who seek to exploit or unduly influence them.39
Although the reasons behind the rule that testators be of sound mind
and free of insane delusions are salutary, another goal, that of promoting
36
DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 167.
See Baron, supra note 20, at 1050 (discussing how some individuals have suggested
that the rule requiring mental capacity “has little to do with effectuating individual choices
but instead is designed to protect the testator’s family from disinheritance”); Champine,
supra note 25, at 44 (discussing the “norm of reciprocity” theory based on “implicit
understandings between testators and beneficiaries involving reciprocal exchanges [that]
should be enforced” and explaining that this norm “looks to the testator’s interactions with
individuals rather than the familial relationship per se to define fairness”); Milton D. Green,
Public Policies Underlying the Law of Mental Incompetency, 38 MICH. L. REV. 1189, 1218
(1940) (“The argument that mental soundness as a prerequisite to testamentary capacity is
bottomed upon the policy of the law to protect the family . . . .”); Leslie, supra note 20, at
246 (discussing the “unspoken presumption that a testator would always want to benefit
family members as opposed to others . . . .”); Robert E. Mensel, Right Feeling and Knowing
Right: Insanity in Testators and Criminals in Nineteenth Century American Law, 58 OKLA.
L. REV. 397, 437 (2005) (“When insanity was raised to attack the testamentary capacity of a
decedent who had disinherited the natural objects of his or her
bounty . . . courts . . . incorporated in the standard of sanity the ability to feel the obligations
of family.”); Amy D. Ronner, Homophobia: In the Closet and in the Coffin, 21 LAW &
INEQ. 65, 72 (2003) (explaining that “if the named beneficiaries are spouses, children, or
other [traditional] family members, courts typically refrain from entangling themselves in
the decedent’s motives or morals” and are less inclined to invalidate the wills).
38
DUKEMINIER SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 167.
39
Id. (“If the incompetent could make wills then many institutionalized people would
be subject to imposition by the unscrupulous.”). But see id. (“Keep in mind, however, that
what may look like exploitation to others may give the testator much pleasure.”).
37
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
205
public perception of the law as legitimate, is especially significant.40 There
is an aspiration that the legal institutions, including those governing
succession of property, be seen as sensible.41 People like to believe that
courts are adept at rooting out things that simply do not and cannot have
any basis in reality.42 Stated another way, people want to believe first that
there is a distinction between what is real and what is not,43 and second that
human beings are capable of making that distinction.44 Apparently,
Dostoevsky is not convinced that either prong of that proposition has much
credence.45
Although the same policies minister to both mental capacity and insane
delusion theories and contestants frequently lodge them together, courts
treat them as two distinct attacks.46 If Dostoevsky were alive today, he
would likely advocate a fusion of the two theories and give will contestants
an additional hurdle to overcome before they achieve invalidation.47
40
Id. at 168 (“[L]egitimacy cannot exist unless decisions are reasoned. . . . On this
view, it is important that the succession to property be perceived as a responsible, reasoned
act, according the survivors their just deserts.”).
41
Id.
42
See Grant H. Morris & Ansar Haroun, “God Told Me to Kill”: Religion or
Delusion?, 38 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 973, 1012 (2001) (“The law presumes that everyone
experiences the same reality. This presumption is only overcome by total cognitive
impairment. . . . [T]he court examines the defendant’s subjective reality when it decides
whether the defendant suffered from a mental disorder.”).
43
Id.
44
Id.
45
E.g., DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 171 (narrating a scene in which Golyadkin’s
response to the inexplicable appearance of used dishware, serviette, and silverware is to
exclaim, “[a]nything is possible”).
46
See, e.g., Breeden v. Stone (In re Estate of Breeden), 992 P.2d 1167, 1170 (Colo.
2000) (delineating and defining distinct tests for capacity and insane delusion). See also
DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 168 (“A person may have sufficient
mental capacity generally to execute a will but be suffering from an insane delusion so as to
cause a will to fail for lack of testamentary capacity nonetheless.”); Fogel, supra note 20, at
67–68 (addressing whether “a delusion about a specific subject [can] obviate testamentary
capacity even though the testator is, in all other respects sane”).
47
See infra Part III.D (proposing a modification of current mental capacity law).
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A. Lack of General Mental Capacity
The rule requiring a testator to be of sound mind to make a will has
existed for about five centuries.48 In deference to testamentary freedom,
the mental-capacity test is designed to be lenient:49
[T]he testator or donor must be capable of knowing and
understanding in a general way [1] the nature and extent of
his or her property, [2] the natural objects of his or her
bounty, and [3] the disposition that he or she is making of
that property, and must also be capable of [4] relating
48
See, e.g., EUNICE L. ROSS AND THOMAS J. REED, WILL CONTESTS § 2:6 (2d ed. 1999)
(“The first attempt to make a judicial synthesis and to develop a doctrinal test for
testamentary capacity occurs in 1601 in Pawlet, Marquess of Winchester’s Case.”). In
Pawlet, when the Marquess of Winchester’s will gave most of his property to illegitimate
children, the legitimate son sued, arguing that his father was not sane when he executed his
will. Id. Attorney General Lord Coke argued that courts should first decide whether a
testator is mentally competent to make a will and the court agreed, announcing the rule
by law it is not sufficient that the testator be of memory when he makes
his will, to answer familiar and usual questions, but he ought to have a
disposing memory so that he is able to make a disposition of his lands
with understanding and reason; and that is such a memory which the
law calls sane and perfect memory.
Id. (quoting Pawlet, Marquess of Winchester’s Case, (1601) 77 Eng. Rep. 287
(K.B.) 288).
The modern test for testamentary capacity derives from two later English cases,
Greenwood v. Greenwood, (1790) 163 Eng. Rep. 930 (K.B), and Harwood v. Baker, (1840)
13 Eng. Rep. 117 (P.C.); it is sometimes called the Greenwood-Baker rule. Thomas J.
Reed, Breaking Wills in Indiana, 14 IND. L. REV. 865, 867 (1981). In Greenwood, Lord
Kenyon charged the jury, requiring the testator to understand (1) what he possessed and (2)
what were the natural objects of his bounty, while the court in Baker later added the third
prong, that the testator be capable of forming an intelligent distribution plan. ROSS & REED,
supra.
49
See Fogel, supra note 20, at 79 (“Courts have frequently stated that an individual may
execute a valid will even though his capacity is significantly impaired.”).
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
207
these elements to one another and forming an orderly
desire regarding the disposition of the property.50
The individual with sound mind does not have to be particularly bright,
accurate, or unmistaken.51 Imperfect people with all sorts of quirks can
pass the test with flying colors.52 A seminal case, In re Wright’s Estate,53
proclaimed that wills should not be invalidated simply because a testator is
eccentric, nonconforming, or outlandish, and cemented that legal cliché in
place.54
In Wright, the often drunk testator lived in a shack packed with dirt
and junk, picked up trash and hid it in his house, falsely bragged of owning
lots of homes, insisted on buying furniture that was not for sale, offered
someone kerosene-soaked fish to eat, sporadically pretended to be dead,
and failed to acknowledge his own granddaughter in the street.55 He
“picked up paper flowers from garbage cans . . . and pinned them on rose
bushes in his yard and took [a] witness to look at his roses.”56
The Supreme Court of California said that Wright had a sufficiently
sound mind and found “no evidence that he did not appreciate his relations
and obligations to others, or that he was not mindful of the property which
he possessed.”57 It stressed that “[t]estamentary capacity cannot be
destroyed by showing a few isolated acts, foibles, idiosyncrasies, moral or
mental irregularities or departures from the normal unless they directly
50
RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF PROP.: WILLS AND OTHER DONATIVE TRANSFERS § 8.1(b)
(2003).
51
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 159 (explaining how “the
requirements for mental capacity are minimal”).
52
E.g., Hindmarch v. Angell (In re Wright’s Estate), 60 P.2d 434, 436 (Cal. 1936)
(describing the testator's antics).
53
60 P.2d 434 (Cal. 1936).
54
Id. at 438; accord Breeden, 992 P.2d at 1168 (adhering to the basic dictate of the
Wright court, the court upheld the holographic will of a testator whom the court found to be
delusional).
55
Wright, 60 P.2d at 436–37. One witness said that Wright “often chased the children
out of his yard and turned the hose on them and that children in the neighborhood were
afraid of Mr. Wright.” Id. at 436.
56
Id. at 436. Further, Wright “went away with a blanket wrapped around him and was
gone several days and made no explanation as to where he went . . . [and] took from his
daughter’s house a radio which the witness said he had given to his daughter and
granddaughter without making any explanation as to why he did so.” Id.
57
Id. at 438.
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bear upon and have influenced the testamentary act.”58 There are cases
however, in which courts invalidate wills of people much less outlandish
than Mr. Wright or deem the people to be insanely deluded.59
B. Insane Delusion
An insane delusion can also nullify a will.60 The theory is that a
testator may have adequate general mental capacity, but nevertheless
suffers from a delusion or monomania which confines itself to and affects
one or several aspects of a testator’s life.61 These cases involve testators
who, purportedly without basis, believe family members are possessed by
the devil or trying to kill them,62 spouses are cheating,63 their children are
fathered by someone else,64 they have a wife and children when they do
not,65 or FBI or DEA agents are monitoring their lives.66 Courts have held
58
Id.
See infra Part II.B (discussing cases in which wills have been invalidated when it is
not crystal clear that the testator was insanely deluded or whether the supposed delusions
caused the disposition).
60
DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 168.
61
Blumenthal, supra note 20, at 979.
62
See, e.g., Zielinski v. Moczulski (In re Estate of Zielinski), 623 N.Y.S.2d 653, 655
(App. Div. 1995) (testator believed that husband and already dead husband were harming
her); M.I. Marshall & Ilsley Trust. Co. of Ariz. v. McCannon (In re Killen), 937 P.2d 1369,
1370 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1996) (testator believed that nieces and nephews were harming her).
Cf. Dew v. Clark, (1826) 162 Eng. Rep. 410 (K.B.) 421 (testator called his daughter names,
such as “the special property of Satan”).
63
See, e.g., Benjamin v. Woodring, 303 A.2d 779, 783 (Md. Ct. App. 1973) (husband
believed that wife was unfaithful and accused her of going to bars and picking up men); In
re Kaven’s Estate, 272 N.W. 696, 697 (Mich. 1937) (testator believed that her husband was
having extramarital affairs); In re Honigman’s Will, 168 N.E.2d 676, 677–78 (N.Y. 1960)
(testator believed that his elderly wife was unfaithful and was hiding male suitors “in the
cellar . . . in various closets, and under the bed”); Joslin v. Henry (In re Estate of Joslin), 89
N.W.2d 822, 823 (Wisc. 1958) (woman believed that husband was squandering money on
other women and carrying on an adulterous affair with a neighbor).
64
See, e.g., Davis v. Davis, 170 P. 208, 210 (Colo. 1918) (father believed without a
rational basis that his son was not his son).
65
See, e.g., Athey v. Rask (In re Estate of Rask), 214 N.W.2d 525, 529 (N.D. 1974)
(testator, who was never married, believed that he had a wife and child and left his estate to
his adoptive niece, whom he was convinced was his daughter.).
59
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
209
that insanely delusional testators cannot execute valid wills if the wills are
the product of the delusion.67 This begs the question: What is an insane
delusion?
Although delusion is a legal construct, psychiatry can help.68 For a
long time, mental health experts have tried to define delusional thought,
which has been considered the core of insanity.69 The Diagnostic and
66
See, e.g., Petitioners-Appellants’ Opening Brief at 5, Breeden v. Stone (In re Estate
of Breeden), 992 P.2d 1167 (Colo. 2000) (No. 98SC570) (arguing that an example of the
testator’s delusional beliefs was his conviction that everyone was an FBI or DEA agent, that
they were watching him, and that the FBI was working in partnership with the Public
Service to tunnel into his house when new sewer lines were being installed).
67
To invalidate a will on this basis, contestants must prove that the testator suffered
from an insane delusion. See Fogel, supra note 20, at 86. The contestant must also show
that the will or part of the will contested was a product of the insane delusion. Id. at 96. A
majority of courts will not invalidate a will unless the insane delusion also materially
affected or influenced the will’s provisions. DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note
19, at 178; accord Breeden, 992 P.2d at 1174, 1176 (noting that although the testator
suffered from insane delusions, they did not materially affect or influence the disposition of
property in the will). The minority view, however, is that a will is invalid if the testator’s
insane delusion “might have . . . caused or affected” the disposition. In re Honigman’s
Will, 168 N.E.2d at 679 (quoting Am. Seaman’s Friend Soc. v. Hopper, 33 N.Y. 619, 625
(N.Y. 1865)). See also Fogel, supra note 20, at 95–96 (explaining that the “affected”
standard in Honigman was a “much easier standard to meet than the standard required by
most courts—including other New York courts—that the will be a product of the
delusion”).
68
See generally DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 168 (“An insane
delusion is a legal, not a psychiatric, concept.”).
69
See Grant H. Morris & Ansar Haroun, supra note 42, at 1019 (“[D]elusional thought
has been considered the very essence of insanity. . . . [P]sychiatrists today define delusion
in much the same way they defined delusion in the mid-nineteenth century.”). Compare
Rex v. Hadfield, (1800) 27 Howell’s St. Tr. 1281, 1313 (K.B.) (noting that after defendant
entered a theatre and fired a shot at King George III, Hadfield’s barrister, Thomas Erskine,
won an acquittal and argued that in madness, “reason is not driven from her seat, but
distraction sits down upon it along with her, holds her, trembling, upon it, and frightens her
from her propriety”) with NORMAN J. FINKEL, INSANITY ON TRIAL 14–15 (1988) (describing
how Hadfield had delusions and believed it was his mission to kill the King to pave the way
for the second coming of Christ); J.C. Oleson, Is Tyler Durden Insane? 83 N.D. L. REV.
579, 601 n.144 (2007) (discussing insane delusion test, Hadfield’s trial, and comparing
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Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),70 published by the
American Psychiatric Association, and at times called “the psychiatric
profession’s diagnostic Bible,”71 gives a definition of delusion that heeds
today’s legal formula: “A false belief based on incorrect inference about
external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else
believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or
evidence to the contrary.”72 Unlike a mistake, an insane delusion cannot
be corrected by presenting or even bombarding the afflicted individuals
with evidence that their beliefs are false.73
According to the DSM, there are two categories of insane delusions:
the non-bizarre and the bizarre.74 Both categories present facts analogous
to those in will contests. The non-bizarre encompasses “situations that
occur in real life,” such as “being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a
distance, or deceived by one’s spouse or lover.”75 The bizarre, on the other
hand, goes beyond the pale: they are “clearly implausible, not
understandable, and not derived from ordinary life.”76 For example, a
Hadfield’s “fascinating delusions” to those of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, “who
believed that his actions were necessary to save humanity from the evils of modernity”).
70
AM. PSYCHIATRIC ASS’N, DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL OF MENTAL
DISORDERS: DMS-IV-TR (4th ed. 2000) [hereinafter DSM].
71
Morris & Haroun, supra note 42, at 1023 n.298. Morris & Haroun also explain that
another definitive work used by psychiatrists (but not generally in the United States) is the
World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, which discusses and
uses the term “delusion,” but does not define what a “delusion” is. Id. at 1022.
72
DSM, supra note 70, at 821. According to the DSM, a delusion is a belief not
“ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture . . . .” Id. See
also Morris & Haroun, supra note 42, at 1025–26.
73
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 168 (“An insane delusion is
a belief not susceptible to correction by presenting the testator with evidence indicating the
falsity of the belief. A mistake is susceptible to correction if the testator is told the truth.”);
DSM, supra note 70, at 821 (defining delusion as “[a] false belief based on incorrect
inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else
believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the
contrary”).
74
DSM, supra note 70, at 324. See also id. at 325 (describing subtypes of delusions
including grandioses, persecutory, and somatic delusions); Morris & Haroun, supra note 42,
at 1026 (listing thought broadcasting and thought insertion also).
75
DSM, supra note 70, at 324.
76
Id.
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
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bizarrely delusional individual might believe “that a stranger has removed
his or her internal organs and has replaced them with someone else’s
organs without leaving any wounds or scars.”77 When they are shown that
there are no wounds or scars and that what they believe is totally
impossible, they nevertheless cling to their falsehoods.78
1. The Bizarre
The facts in Zielinski v. Moczulski 79 mirror the DSM description of
bizarre.80 There, Cecilia Zielinski left everything to her sister Barbara and
Barbara’s husband.81 When Cecilia excluded her only son, grandchildren,
and great-grandchildren, the omitted beneficiaries opposed probate on
insane delusion grounds.82
77
Id. See also Morris & Haroun, supra note 42, at 1031 (quoting the definition of
bizarre delusion from the third edition DSM as “[a] false belief whose content is patently
absurd and has no possible basis in fact”).
78
See, e.g., Baron, supra note 20, at 1055 (“A large number of the definitions . . . state
that an insane delusion exists where there is no evidence to support the testator’s belief.”);
Fogel, supra note 20, at 68 (giving an example of an insane delusion as the testator who
believed she was the Holy Ghost). Despite the fantastic nature of the previous examples, a
majority of courts find that “a delusion is insane even if there is some factual basis for
it . . . [but] a rational person in the testator’s situation could not have drawn the conclusion
reached by the testator.” DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 169. The
minority view is that “if there is any factual basis for the testator’s belief, it is not deemed
insane.” Id. (citing Estate of Kottke, 6 P.3d 243 (Alaska 2000)).
79
(In re Estate of Zielinski), 623 N.Y.S.2d 653 (N.Y. App. Div. 1995).
80
See supra notes 73–78 and accompanying text (defining bizarre delusions).
81
Zielinski, 623 N.Y.S.2d at 654.
82
Id. In Zielinski, Cecilia Zielinski was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with
colon cancer. Id. While there, Cecilia’s sister Barbara and Barbara’s husband visited daily.
Id. In the hospital and in Barbara’s presence, Cecilia executed her will, which provided for
the distribution of her residuary estate in equal shares to Barbara and Barbara’s husband.
Id. As it turned out, Cecilia’s assets were considerable: she had a house and about 200
savings bonds, which she purchased over a twenty year period and were payable to either a
grandchild or great-grand child. Id. As the court noted, however, “[n]o bonds were issued
in the name of proponent, proponent’s husband, or any of decedent’s other siblings.” Id.
On the day that Cecilia executed her will, she also signed a power of attorney in favor of
her sister. Id. Barbara, acting pursuant to the power of attorney, redeemed as many of the
savings bonds as she could and deposited the proceeds in a bank account in Cecilia’s name.
Id. When Cecilia died, Barbara and her husband became entitled to the proceeds because
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The Zielinski contestants possessed heavy artillery: the consulting
hospital psychiatrist diagnosed Cecilia on the date of her admission with a
delusional disorder relating to her son.83 Cecilia believed that her son,
along with her husband and doctors, plotted to and did inject her in the
buttocks.84 The psychiatrist “opined that patients with this disorder could
be competent in some respects and delusional with respect to others.”85
According to another psychiatrist, Cecelia thought that “her husband [who
was already dead] broke her legs” and that her son “was getting
instructions from a ‘device’ that turned the world inside out.”86
Other witnesses said that Cecilia believed that her son inserted
balloons into her stomach, that her husband ran over her legs and replaced
them with a stranger’s legs, that her son injected her with chemicals, and
that her husband, son, and doctors were conspiring against her.87 She also
thought that her husband and doctors shoved her eyes way back into her
head.88 In an abundance of caution, Cecilia regularly spit into a jar to
preserve evidence of these horrors.89 The trial revealed that twenty-five to
thirty one-gallon jars, supposedly full of saliva, were stashed in Cecilia’s
closet.90
they were the beneficiaries under the will. Id. After a nonjury trial, the court denied
probate and directed Barbara to pay the named beneficiaries the amounts they would have
received had the bonds not been redeemed. Id. On appeal, the court affirmed the finding of
self-dealing and found “sufficient credible evidence to support the conclusion . . . that
[Barbara], in redeeming the savings bonds at issue, intended to make a gift to herself and in
so doing breached her fiduciary duty to decedent.” Id. at 656.
83
Id. at 655.
84
Id.
85
Id.
86
Id. Attending nurses also testified confirming “the delusional statements regarding
[Cecilia’s] son” and “[t]wo additional psychiatrists, one proffered by proponent and the
other by the challengers, confirmed such diagnosis after their review of the medical
records.” Id. Significantly, they bolstered the finding of causation by testifying that “such
delusions may have directly affected decedent’s decision to exclude Zielinski from the
will.” Id.
87
Id.
88
Id.
89
Id.
90
Id. The son’s wife “testified that when she met [Cecilia] . . . , [Cecilia] told her about
her legs being substituted and the balloons” and “confirmed prior testimony about the
‘devices’ and the spitting into a jar.” Id. Significantly, all “witnesses . . . testified that there
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
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Proponent Barbara lost in the trial court and again on appeal.91 The
appellate court noted that the contestants bore the difficult burden of
showing “that [Cecilia’s] mind was affected by an insane delusion
regarding her son.”92 Nevertheless, the appellate court concluded that
Cecilia suffered from an insane delusion which directly caused her to
exclude her son.93 The court felt that “[e]ven if it could be said that
decedent had general testamentary capacity, she could, at the same time,
have an insane delusion which controlled her testamentary act, thus
rendering it invalid.”94
There are of course other cases like Zielinski in which people are
inextricably wedded to sheer impossibility. For example, there is a case in
which a headless wolf visited the testator while taking a stroll.95 In still
another case, the testator believed that he had personally traveled to other
planets, made friends there, and learned that he would run a stone quarry
on Saturn post-death.96 The common thread in the Zielinski genre is an
was no basis for such statements and that there existed a good relationship between
. . . [Cecilia and her son].” Id.
91
Id. at 656.
92
Id. at 654–55.
93
Id. at 655.
94
Id. at 656.
95
Masters v. Haywood (In re Haywood’s Estate), 240 P.2d 1028, 1032 (Cal. Ct. App.
1952). In Haywood, the evidence demonstrated that “during the psychiatric examination,
the testator [said] . . . that . . . while he was walking on a road, a headless animal resembling
a wolf appeared and then suddenly disappeared.” Id. Because this delusion or
“hallucination was not related to the will in any way,” the court affirmed a finding of
mental competency. Id. at 1034.
96
McReynolds v. Smith, 86 N.E. 1009, 1011 (Ind. 1909). The McReynolds court found
that the evidence established insane delusion that the will was “at least in some measure, the
result of such delusion” and elaborated:
[T]he testator believed that he was in direct and active communication
with the spirit world; that he had . . . personally visited the planets,
formed an acquaintance with their inhabitants, and had had it revealed
to him that he should, after death, go to the planet Saturn and conduct a
stone quarry, and furthermore, that he had been instructed from the
spirit world by revelation, how he should make his will . . . .
Id. at 1012. See also Gulf Oil Co. v. Walker, 288 S.W.2d 173, 179 (Tex. Civ. App. 1956)
(noting that testator fought with the devil, visited both heaven and hell, spoke with devils,
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individual’s unshakable adherence to something that cannot occur.97 Most
people (including The Double’s author) are likely to argue with the
decisions in the bizarre cases.
2. The Non-bizarre
Most will contests tend to fall into the non-bizarre category.98 Nonbizarre testators do not adhere to total implausibility.99 Instead, what they
perceive is possible, but the events may not be actually happening.100
Here, what decision makers must decide is whether the testators have a
reasonable basis for their beliefs or perceptions. Dostoevsky, a psyche
virtuoso, would likely chuckle and proclaim this task to be as futile as
fetching water in a sieve.
The case law bears Dostoevsky out. The only consistency in the nonbizarre decisions is inconsistency, which commentators tend to pin on two
reasons. Some commentators detect a proclivity on the part of judges and
juries to invalidate wills when they dislike either a testator or the chosen
beneficiaries.101 Other legal analysts attribute the conflicting results to the
particular jurisdiction’s approach to the burden of proof.102 The decisions
in will contests based on lack of general mental capacity are just as
inconsistent, with results just as questionable, when they do not involve
individuals with bizarre delusions.103 However, when a testator is suffering
imps, demons and angels, saw “the devil making candy out of plow points,” heard the devil
“playing a tune on the fiddle,” and encountered “the devil’s horse, which was so big it had
one foot in St. Louis and the other in California”).
97
See McReynolds, 86. N.E. at 1011; Gulf Oil Co., 288 S.W.2d at 179; In re Haywood’s
Estate, 240 P.2d at 1032.
98
See supra note 62.
99
E.g., Benjamin v. Woodring, 303 A.2d 779, 783 (Md. Ct. App. 1973) (noting that the
husband believed that his wife was unfaithful and accused her of going to bars and picking
up men).
100
Id.
101
See, e.g., In re Strittmater’s Estate, 53 A.2d 205 (N.J. 1947) (invalidating will where
testator overtly chose not to pick her family as primary beneficiaries); Sanford v. Freeman
(In re Estate of Watlack), 945 P.2d 1154 (Wash. Ct. App. 1997) (invalidating will where
nephews and nieces who never visited or went to decedent’s funeral took in lieu of
decedent's own children who cared for their father in his declining years).
102
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 178.
103
Compare In re Estate of Washburn, 690 A.2d 1024, 1026–27 (N.H. 2007)
(upholding the probate court’s finding that the testatrix lacked capacity where she suffered
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
215
from bizarre delusions, society and the courts tend to be more accepting of
the resultant invalidation.104
a. Blame It on Bias
There are non-bizarre cases in which decision makers invalidate wills,
because they dislike either the testators or their chosen beneficiaries.
According to Professor Melanie B. Leslie, the result in these cases ends up
trumping testamentary freedom:
[C]ourts impose upon testators a duty to provide for those
to whom the court views as having a superior moral claim
from “some degree of Alzheimer’s” and “lay witnesses indicated confusion, forgetfulness,
and a lack of competency”) with Wilson v. Lane, 614 S.E.2d 88, 88–89 (2005) (disagreeing
with the jury and instead agreeing with the trial judge that the testatrix had sufficient
testamentary capacity even though “she was in some form of the early to middle stages of a
dementia of the Alzheimer’s type,” “called the fire department to report a non-existent fire,”
“had an irrational fear of flooding in her house,” “had trouble dressing and bathing herself,”
had “a guardianship petition filed” on her behalf only a few months after the will execution,
and a physician’s letter stated that she “suffered from senile dementia”). The court upheld
the validity of the will in Wilson where there was more evidence of incompetency than in
Washburn, where the court invalidated the will. Here too, the seemingly inconsistent
outcomes can be explained by the evidentiary burdens in each case. DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF
& LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 165 (“Putting the burden of proof (or, more specifically, the
burden of persuasion) on the proponent to show testamentary capacity, as in Washburn, is
the minority rule” while “[t]he prevailing rule, as in Wilson . . . is that once the proponent
adduces prima facie evidence of due execution, the party contesting the will on the grounds
of lack of capacity has the burden of persuasion”). It is possible to say that decision-maker
bias is at work here as well. In Washburn, the testatrix executed three wills, eventually
leaving just about everything to her caretaker in lieu of her family members. Washburn,
690 A.2d at 1026. In Wilson, the testatrix left her property equally to seventeen
beneficiaries, only one of which was a “non-relative” caretaker. Wilson, 614 S.E.2d at 88–
89. It is thus possible that, unlike the Washburn court that might have sensed undue
influence and felt that the distribution was not normative, the Wilson court was comfortable
because almost all of the beneficiaries were blood-relatives.
104
See, e.g., Gulf Oil Corp. v. Walker, 288 S.W.2d 173, 179–80 (Tex. Civ. App. 1956).
This was a case involving bizarre delusions, where testator believed, among other things,
that he was “having a fight with the devil,” visited both heaven and hell, and “talked with
the devil, imps, demons, and angels, . . .” and the court said that the evidence “[went]
beyond a mere showing that [testator] . . . had insane delusions, and show[ed] evidence of
an unsound mind generally.” Id.
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to the testator’s assets, usually a financially dependent
spouse or persons related by blood to the testator. Wills
that fail to provide for those individuals typically are
upheld only if the will’s proponent can convince the factfinder that the testator’s deviation from normative values
is morally justifiable. This unspoken rule, seeping quietly
but fervently from the case law, directly conflicts with the
oft-repeated axiom that testamentary freedom is the
polestar of wills law.105
When courts prefer wills reflecting “prevailing normative views,” they can
issue unpredictable and disingenuous decisions.106 Ironically, Dew v.
Clark,107 the very decision that birthed the insane delusion doctrine, is at
least questionable and probably wrong.108
The 1826 Dew case focused on Doctor Ely Stott, a vile man, who
virtually disinherited his only child Charlotte.109 After Stott left the bulk of
his estate to his nephews, Charlotte contested the will on the novel theory
of insane delusion.110 Charlotte described how her father from her infancy
exhibited an “insane aversion to [her]” and called her names such as
“fiend,” “a very devil,” and the “special property of Satan.”111 Once, Stott
locked her in an asylum for a night so that she could spend it with an
105
Leslie, supra note 20, at 236.
Id.
107
Dew v. Clark, (1826) 162 Eng. Rep. 410 (K.B.). Dew involved three distinct cases
with the same litigants and same will, each decided by the Prerogative Court. Fogel, supra,
note 20, at 83 n.95. The first allowed Charlotte to admit proof regarding her father’s insane
delusion. Dew v. Clark (Dew I), (1822) 162 Eng. Rep. 98 (K.B.) 98. The second also
involved evidentiary issues. Dew v. Clark (Dew II), (1824) 162 Eng. Rep. 233 (K.B.) 233.
The third Dew invalidated the will. Dew v. Clark (Dew III), (1826) 162 Eng. Rep. 410
(K.B) 455.
108
Professor Fogel states that Dew III is “generally cited as the first monomania case.”
Fogel, supra note 20, at 83 n.95; accord ISAAC RAY, A TREATISE ON THE MEDICAL
JURISPRUDENCE OF INSANITY 181–83 (Winfred Overholser ed., 1962) (discussing Dew as the
early recognition of “partial mania”).
109
Dew III, 162 Eng. Rep. at 454.
110
Id. at 411–12, 414.
111
Id. at 427, 433. See also RAY, supra note 108, at 182 (“Repeatedly, and on the most
trivial occasions, he struck her with his clenched fists, cut her flesh with a horsewhip, tore
out her hair, and once aimed at her a blow with some weapon which made a dent in a
mahogany table and which must have killed her, had she not avoided it.”).
106
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
217
insane female patient.112
The contestants’ corroborators portrayed
Charlotte as an “unexceptional character,” while they contrasted her with
Stott, a “deranged . . . monster.”113 Charlotte did not challenge her father’s
general testamentary capacity; instead, she argued that Stott’s insanity was
solely fixated on her.114
The proponents tried to rebut Charlotte’s case with a conflicting
narrative.115 They did not dispute the fact that the testator was repulsive,
but argued that the will was rational and consistent with Stott’s rigid
Calvinism and vision of “human nature” as “total[ly] and absolute[ly]
deprav[ed].”116 As the proponents argued, Stott was a man of “irritable and
violent temper; of great pride and conceit; very precise in all his domestic
and other arrangements; very impatient of contradiction; and embued [sic]
with high notions of parental authority.”117 The proponents, painting
Charlotte as “disobedient” and “very perverse, sullen, and idle,” implied
that her father’s treatment of her was justified, or at least
comprehensible.118 Pounding the pulpit of testamentary freedom, they
asserted that insanity did not affect the estate plan and should not strip
Stott of the right to choose the beneficiaries of his property.119
Sir John Nicholl, the decision’s author, saw it as a “perfectly novel
case,” pointed to “delusion” as “the true test . . . of the absence or presence
of insanity.”120 He elaborated:
Wherever the patient once conceives something
extravagant to exist, which has still no existence whatever
but in his own heated imagination; and wherever, at the
same time, having once so conceived, he is incapable of
being . . . permanently [] reasoned out [of] that conception;
112
Dew II, 162 Eng. Rep. at 235.
Dew III, 162 Eng. Rep. at 425, 428.
114
Dew I, 162 Eng. Rep. at 100 (“[S]he can only prove it by making out a case . . . that
the deceased was insane as to her, notwithstanding his general sanity.”).
115
Dew III, 162 Eng. Rep. at 421.
116
Id. at 420.
117
Id.
118
Id. at 425.
119
See id. at 434 (arguing that the testamentary choice was instead a result of
Charlotte’s choice of a husband).
120
Id. at 412, 414.
113
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such a person is said to be under a delusion, in a peculiar,
half-technical, sense of the term.121
Sir Nicholl concluded that Charlotte established not only insane
delusion but also requisite causation, and said that Stott’s will was “the
direct unqualified offspring of that morbid delusion.”122 Although Sir
Nicholl admitted that there was some factual basis for Stott’s hatred of his
daughter, he made a point of praising Charlotte and vilifying the testator.123
Sir Nicholl, noting that a jury would likely be sympathetic to Charlotte,124
“protested” (and perhaps too much) that sentiment did not drive his
opinion.125
The Dew case inaugurated not only the doctrine but also the nimbus of
doubt that hovers over the non-bizarre landscape today. Although most
readers would likely dislike Stott and of course censure child abuse, it is
not a given that reprehensibility warrants nullification. Stated otherwise,
as bad as Stott was, he should retain the right to disinherit a child he
happens to detest. Was Stott really sick with an aversion to Charlotte, or
was his dead hand desperately (and even maliciously) contriving to flog a
“disobedient” and “perverse, sullen, and idle” daughter?126 It is at least
conceivable that Sir Nicholl, understandably repulsed by Stott and desirous
of rescuing Charlotte, tweaked the estate plan to benefit one whom he
designated the natural object of the testator’s bounty.127
121
Id.
Id. at 456.
123
Id. at 444.
124
Dew II, 162 Eng. Rep. at 236–37 (“It [was] said that the plaintiff was naturally
anxious to submit her case . . . to a jury, that with such a case she had a much better
prospect of succeeding with a jury through the medium of their feelings than of obtaining
the sentence of a Court . . . . The Court . . . avow[ed] that it participate[d] to some extent in
the feeling with which a British jury may be supposed to have looked at [the] case . . . .”).
Id.
125
Dew III, 162 Eng. Rep. at 456 (“[T]he Court has only again to protest that its
feelings in this case have been suffered to bias in its judgment.”). See also Fogel, supra
note 20, at 84–85 (discussing the court’s protestations that sympathy did not “cloud its
judgment”).
126
Dew III, 162 Eng. Rep. at 425.
127
See, e.g., Fogel, supra note 20, at 70–71 (discussing how the doctrine allows for
“significant leeway” for courts to invalidate wills that do not comport with their own
notions of family or to give property to those who the courts designate the natural objects of
the testators’ bounty).
122
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
219
Another classic case, In re Strittmater’s Estate,128 displays bias even
more blatant than it is in Dew and corroborates Professor Leslie’s thesis
that courts reject wills that deviate from “prevailing normative views.”129
In Strittmater, the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals (now the
Supreme Court of New Jersey) declined to probate the will of Louisa
Strittmater, who left her property to the National Woman’s Party.130
Louisa, who never married, lived with her parents until their death.131
Although she had a “normal childhood” and loved her parents, she turned
against them after their death: she called her father “a corrupt, vicious, and
unintelligent savage, a typical specimen of the majority of his sex” and
wrote “[b]last his wormstinking carcass and his whole damn breed.”132
Louisa, who apparently reviled her mother as well, denominated her the
“[m]oronic she-devil.”133
The trial revealed that Louisa once smashed a clock, killed a kitten,
and used foul language.134 Doctor Smalley, Louisa’s general practitioner,
was the only medical expert.135 Even though he was not a psychiatrist, he
said that Louisa “suffered from paranoia of the Bleuler type of split
personality.”136 Although the court “regret[ted] not having had the benefit
of an analysis of the data by a specialist in diseases of the brain,” it
nevertheless rubber-stamped Smalley’s opinion.137
What apparently irritated the court was Louisa’s chosen beneficiary,138
the National Woman’s Party (the Party), a feminist organization.139 When
128
53 A.2d 205 (N.J. 1947).
Leslie, supra note 20, at 236.
130
Strittmater, 53 A.2d at 205–06.
131
Id. at 205.
132
Id.
133
Id.
134
Id.
135
Id.
136
Id.
137
Id.
138
See id. at 206 (dismissing the long-lasting nature of Louisa’s dedication to the
beneficiary, the National Woman’s Party).
139
The National Woman’s Party was founded in 1916 by Alice Paul, who drafted the
Equal Rights Amendment in 1921 and fought to have sex discrimination added to the
protections of Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Jo Freeman, How “Sex” Got into
Title VII: Persistent Opportunism as a Maker of Public Policy, 9 LAW & INEQ. 163, 165
(1991).
129
220
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Louisa was about twenty-nine years old she joined the Party’s local branch
and for several years before her death she volunteered in its New York
office.140 During this period, Louisa talked about leaving her estate to the
Party.141 The trial revealed that, despite testimony supporting the claim of
insanity, she had “entirely reasonable and normal” relations with both her
lawyer and bank.142
When Louisa died, she left everything to the Party and “some cousins
of whom she saw very little during the last few years of her life”
challenged the will on insane delusion grounds.143 Although the will was
initially admitted to probate, the intermediate court reversed and sided with
the cousins.144 In affirming the decision not to probate the will, New
Jersey’s highest court noted that “the proofs demonstrated
‘incontrovertably [sic] her morbid aversion to men’ and feminism to a
neurotic extreme.’”145 The court felt that Louisa, who “regarded men as a
class with an insane hatred[,] . . . looked forward to the day when women
would bear children without the aid of men, and all males would be put to
death at birth.”146 The court felt that Louisa’s “paranoic condition,
especially her insane delusions about the male . . . led her to leave her
estate to the National Women’s Party.”147
Under a modern lens, Louisa’s chosen beneficiary could be seen as the
“natural [object] of . . . her bounty.”148 Louisa devoted almost two decades
of her life to the Party and gave it her labor.149 For Louisa, the Party
became a surrogate family, one to whom she chose to transmit her
property.150 The court, disliking the National Woman’s Party and damning
140
Strittmater, 53 A.2d at 205.
Id.
142
Id.
143
Id.
144
Id.
145
Id.
146
Id.
147
Id. at 206.
148
RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF PROP.: WILLS AND OTHER DONATIVE TRANSFERS § 8.1(b)
(2003).
149
Strittmater, 53 A.2d at 205.
150
Cf. Alexander M. Meiklejohn, Contractual and Donative Capacity, 39 CASE W. RES.
L. REV. 307, 325–26 (1988–89) (citing ERIK H. ERICKSON, IDENTITY AND THE LIFE CYCLE
54, app., Worksheet, col. B (1980)) (providing the theoretical implications of the mental
capacity doctrine for contracts and gifts and explains that “[t]he circle widens in childhood
(continued)
141
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
221
what it saw as man-hatred,151 did not feel (in the words of Professor Leslie)
that Louisa’s “deviation from normative values [was] morally
justifiable.”152 While a contemporary court might have seen things
differently and probated the Strittmater and Dew wills, there are more
recent analogues in which contestants win not because a testator is
genuinely deluded, but because of the mindset or bias of a jury or judge.153
to include first parental persons, then ‘basic family,’ then neighbors, teachers, and other
schoolchildren. It later encompasses peer groups, and then expands further to take in those
with whom the young adult cooperates and competes in the world of work”).
151
Strittmater, 53 A.2d at 205.
152
Leslie, supra note 20, at 236. See, e.g., Holland v. Traylor (In re Will of Moses),
227 So. 2d 829, 831–32, 838 (Miss. 1969) (affirming the invalidation of the will of fiftyseven year old Fannie Traylor Moses on the ground of undue influence when she left her
property to her lover, a lawyer, who was fifteen years younger but had no involvement in
the preparation or execution of the will). See also AMY D. RONNER, HOMOPHOBIA AND THE
LAW 161–92 (2005) (discussing discrimination against sexual minorities in wills and trusts
law and cases in which courts have deprived surviving partners in a same-sex relationships
of their inheritance); Green, supra note 25 (discussing cases in which courts validated wills
even when testators probably lacked mental capacity because the courts approved of the
wills and found their contents reasonable).
153
See, e.g., Sanford v. Freeman (In re Estate of Watlack), 945 P.2d 1154 (Wash. Ct.
App. 1997). In that case, the will disinherited the children and left everything to collateral
relatives. Id. at 1155. The jury found, and the appellate court agreed, that the testator, who
thought that his daughter was plotting to steal his money, suffered from an insane delusion
which caused the testamentary disposition. Id. at 1155–56. In Watlack, the testator’s will
gave reasons for the disinheritance and the evidence further showed that there was quite a
bit of truth to these statements. Id. Watlack had already given his car to his daughter and
after he was divorced, “maintained only sporadic contact with his two children . . . .” Id. at
1155. The court, brushing facts aside, said that the father’s pretexts were not real. Id. at
1157. In Watlack-like cases, courts stretch to find insane delusion when they do not
approve of the disposition or when they want to protect family members. See Baron, supra
note 20, at 1049 (“Courts repeatedly criticize juries’ tendencies to strike down, on mental
competency grounds, wills of which they disapprove. If the wishes set forth in the will are
deemed to be the testator’s own, they may not be judged by others.”); supra note 37 and
accompanying text (discussing the views of various commentators who have pointed out the
bias on the part of judges and juries in will contests and how they tend to favor traditional
families and disfavor dispositions that depart from what they feel is normative).
222
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b. Blame It on Burdens of Proof
In addition to bias, differing approaches to burdens of proof are also to
blame for inconsistencies in the case-law.154 For example, divergent
causation tests might account for the ostensible irreconcilability of In re
Honigman’s Will,155 in which a sharply divided court denied probate, and
Breeden v. Stone,156 in which a court probated a will despite a more viable
challenge.157
In Honigman, Frank and Florence had a childless but “congenial and
harmonious” marriage for almost four decades.158 They worked together
as business partners and amassed a “substantial fortune.”159 Some time
before his death, however, Frank felt that his wife was unfaithful and
ranted about it to “friends and strangers alike . . . using obscene and
abusive language.”160 For Frank, the proverbial villain was Mr. Krauss, a
mutual friend, whom Frank believed was having a tawdry affair with his
wife.161 He claimed that his wife was
misbehaving herself in a most unseemly fashion, by hiding
male callers in the cellar of her home, in various closets,
and under the bed; . . . hauling men from the street up to
her second- story bedroom by use of bed
sheets; . . . making contacts over the household telephone;
and . . . passing a clandestine note through the fence on her
brother’s property.162
154
See generally DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 165 (discussing
the evidentiary burdens with respect to testamentary capacity), 178 (discussing the majority
and minority standards for causation in insane delusion contests).
155
168 N.E.2d 676 (N.Y. 1960).
156
(In re Estate of Breeden), 992 P.2d 1167 (Colo. 2000).
157
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 178 (suggesting that the
“outcome in Honigman [would] have been different if the court applied the
Breeden . . . approach to causation”).
158
Honigman, 168 N.E.2d at 677.
159
Id.
160
Id.
161
Id. at 678.
162
Id.
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
223
When Frank died, he left his wife Florence the minimum amount necessary
to satisfy her elective share and essentially gave the rest to siblings.163
After Florence argued insane delusion, the will proponents tried to
prove that there was a reasonable basis for Frank’s belief: they had an
anniversary card from Krauss, which bore “a printed message of
congratulation in sweetly sentimental phraseology . . . addressed to the
wife alone and not received on the anniversary date.”164 For Frank, this
confirmed his suspicions.165 Evidence existed that whenever the phone
rang, Florence would rush to grab it.166 For Frank, this fueled his notion
that Florence was cavorting with Krauss and prompted him to forbid his
wife from answering the phone.167 There was also an episode in which
Florence asked her husband as he was walking out the door when she
could expect him home.168 Frank, again enraged, “secreted himself at a
vantage point in a nearby park and watched his home.”169 From this
vantage point, Frank witnessed Krauss entering his home!170 This story
emerged in a statement that Frank had allegedly made to one witness, but
Florence claimed at trial that none of this ever happened.171
The jury found that Frank “was suffering from an unwarranted and
insane delusion that his wife was unfaithful to him, thereby affecting the
disposition made in the will.”172 The surrogate denied probate and the
court of appeals ultimately approved the jury’s decision.173 The court of
163
Id. at 676–77 (“[J]ust one month before his death, [Honigman] gave $5,000 to each
of three named grandnieces, and cut off his wife, with a life use of her minimum statutory
share plus $2,500, with direction to pay the principal upon her death to his surviving
brothers and sisters and to the descendants of any predeceased brother or sister, per stirpes.
The remaining one half of his estate was bequeathed in equal shares to his surviving
brothers and sisters and to the descendants of any predeceased brother or sister, per stirpes,
some of whom resided in Germany.”).
164
Id. at 677–78.
165
Id. at 678.
166
Id.
167
Id.
168
Id.
169
Id.
170
Id.
171
Id.
172
Id. at 677.
173
Id. The appellate division reversed the surrogate court, but the court of appeals
reversed that ruling, upholding the jury’s decision.
224
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appeals, opining that “[t]he jury had the right to disregard the proponents’
proof, or to go so far as to hold that such trivia afforded even additional
grounds for decedent’s irrational and unwarranted belief,” found that
Florence had met the burden of proving incapacity.174
The Honigman proponents’ best argument was lack of causation: they
contended that even if Frank had an insane delusion, there were sound
alternative reasons for his disposition.175 After all, Florence was
independently wealthy, and the chosen beneficiaries, Frank’s brothers and
sisters needed the gift.176 In rejecting this argument, the court applied a
minority causation test that a will is ineffective when “its ‘dispository
provisions were or might have been caused or affected by the delusion.’”177
The Honigman court essentially assumed causation and shifted the burden
to the proponents to prove that Frank’s will did not ensue from delusion.178
The holding in Honigman is debatable. Its tortuous procedural path—
with the surrogate denying probate,179 an appellate division reversing,180
and a court of appeals reversing once again181 (but with three dissenters)—
leads to doubt. The court of appeals framed the legal issue as “not whether
Mrs. Honigman was unfaithful, but whether Mr. Honigman had any
reasonable basis for believing that she was.”182 In spite of that technically
legal instruction, fact finders (and even professional case readers) cannot
resist tasting the juicy non-issue of whether Florence was actually having
that affair or whether, in Sir Nicholl’s language, it was “the direct
unqualified offspring of . . . morbid delusion.”183 Readers of this case
174
Id. at 678.
Id. at 679.
176
Id.
177
Id. (quoting Am. Seaman’s Friend Soc’y v. Hopper, 33 N.Y. 619, 625 (N.Y. 1865)).
Judge Fuld, authoring the dissenting opinion in which two other judges joined, said: “I
share the Appellate Division’s view that other and sound reasons, quite apart from the
alleged decision, existed for the disposition made by the testator. Indeed, he himself had
declared that his wife had enough money and he wanted to take care of his brothers and
sisters living in Europe.” Id. at 680.
178
Id. at 678.
179
Id. at 677.
180
Id.
181
Id.
182
Id. at 678.
183
Dew III, 162 Eng. Rep. at 456. See also supra Part II.B.2.a (discussing Sir Nicholl’s
decision in Dew).
175
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
225
cannot help but wonder whether Krauss clandestinely slipped Florence that
sugary note, whether Florence jumped up each time the phone rang hoping
to intercept her paramour’s call, and whether Florence and Krauss actually
had that tryst as Frank peered out from the shrubbery.
Although some of Frank’s indictments are more plausible than others,
none of the episodes exceed the realm of possibility. The proponents’
presentations included things that can and do happen and might have been
happening in the Honigman marriage. Of course, the Honigman decision
could also overlap with the bias cases. That is, the Honigman court, sub
silentio, likening the task to equitable distribution. The court did what it
felt was normatively fair by bestowing an intestate share on a spouse who,
for almost forty years, co-partnered in the home and in business.184 Legal
training, however, inclines those in the field to chiefly attribute the
Honigman result to the judicial adoption of a minority causation test.185
Breeden v. Stone,186 another delusion case, is in contrast to Honigman
as the court there upheld the will.187 The rich testator, Spicer Breeden, shot
himself two days after a hit-and-run accident in which he killed the other
car’s driver.188 Breeden left behind a holographic will excluding family
members and igniting a contest.189
The probate court found that the decedent had used cocaine and
alcohol proximate to the time of his death.190 Based on the testimony of
Breeden’s friends, “the court found that the decedent’s moods were
alternately euphoric, fearful, and depressed, and that he was excessively
worried about threats against himself and his dog from government agents,
friends, and others.”191 His siblings presented abundant evidence of
184
See, e.g., Ronner, supra note 37, at 72 (2003) (discussing the judicial predilection to
favor spouses and traditional families in will contests).
185
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 179 (suggesting that the
court’s approach to causation explains why the Honigman case came out the way it did).
186
(In re Estate of Breeden), 992 P.2d 1167 (Colo. 2000).
187
Id. at 1168.
188
Id.
189
Id. His will stated, “I want everything I have to go to Sydney Stone—‘houses,’
‘jewelwry,’ [sic] stocks[,] bonds, cloths [sic]. P.S. I was Not Driving the Vehical—[sic].”
Id. Breeden printed “SPICER H. BREEDEN” at the bottom and signed below the printed
name. Id.
190
Id. at 1169.
191
Id.
226
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Breeden’s allegedly delusional state.192 On one occasion, Breeden was
“so delusional as a result of cocaine and alcohol that he called [his friend]
Chelwick, insisting that she come over to his house because he was
covered with bugs and needed to be taken to the emergency room.” 193
Chelwick responded by rubbing Benadryl on Breeden’s body to calm him
down.194 A month later, the delusions escalated:
[Breeden] thought that people were watching him,
following him and that everyone was a FBI agent or DEA
agent. [Breeden] received a VCR rewinder as a gift which
he promptly stomped, destroyed and threw away because
he thought that Chelwick had planted a listening device in
it. [Breeden was also] . . . convinced that the FBI was
working in conjunction with Public Service to tunnel into
his house when new sewer lines were being installed in his
neighborhood, that people could monitor his behavior
through his television set so he climbed up on the roof and
destroyed the antenna, that the cable company could
monitor him through the cable wires so he cancelled his
cable service, that the FBI could use information against
him so he shredded bills, cards and letters, that he had
individuals search his house for listening devices, and that
he had friends drive by his house to ensure that he was not
being ‘watched.’195
Breeden also thought that a friend was the Unabomber, that the friend
put a bomb in his house, that his father had planted drugs in his Porsche,
and that another friend had swiped his car keys to copy them for use
against him.196 Breeden “spread[] corn flakes in the hall outside his
bedroom to ‘crunch’ if someone sought to accost him when he slept,” and
he frequently changed the locks to his house “to ensure no one had access
to his house.”197 In his last months, Breeden thought that his father, his
sister, and friends “were spying on him, planting drugs, bombs or listening
192
Id.
See Petitioners-Appellants’ Opening Brief at 5, Breeden v. Stone (In re Estate of
Breeden), 992 P.2d 1167 (Colo. 2000) (No. 98 SC 570), 1999 WL 33748234 at * 5.
194
Id.
195
Id. (citations omitted).
196
Id. at 6.
197
Id.
193
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
227
devices in his house or cars, or otherwise threatening his life or
freedom.”198 Once when Chelwick visited, Breeden exploded, hurled his
drink at her, and held her hostage at gun point.199
Despite this showing of extreme behavior, the Breeden contestants
lost.200 In affirming probate, the Supreme Court of Colorado found that
Breeden met the sound mind test and that although he did have insane
delusions, they “did not materially affect or influence the disposition made
in the holographic will.”201 The Supreme Court of Colorado, employing
the majority causation test, noted that there had been testimony in the
probate court that Breeden was estranged from family members and had
little contact with them.202 Breeden also once said that he thought his
father was “irresponsible with money,” that he “disliked his sister’s
husband, and that his relationship with his brother was distant.”203 Further,
Breeden had not put his father or sister in an earlier will.204 Consequently,
the court approved the most threadbare holograph—an undated, scribbled
note, omitting not just the word “will” but also any reference to death—
and said that the delusions were not causal.205
Like most non-bizarre cases, Breeden is debatable. Although the
alleged delusions in Breeden might seem more severe than those of Ely
Stott, Louisa Strittmater, and Frank Honigman, Breeden’s will is
nevertheless honored. This occurs even though the will is haphazard and
the court found Breeden delusional.206
The Breeden court’s finding of delusion, however, is not impervious to
refutation. Although some of Breeden’s beliefs were pretty peculiar (to
say the least), most were things that could have happened. People can and
do experience the sensation of bugs crawling on their skin, and bed bugs,
198
Id.
Id. at 7.
200
Breeden, 992 P.2d at 1176.
201
Id. at 1174.
202
Id.
203
Id.
204
Id.
205
Id. at 1176. See also DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 178
(asking whether the holographic will in Breeden, “which does not contain the word ‘Will,’
is not dated, and makes no explicit mention of death[, s]hould . . . qualify as a will”).
206
Breeden, 992 P.2d at 1174.
199
228
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which can precipitate this, are not uncommon.207 People can and do spy
and even acquire listening devices.208 In fact, at least one of Breeden’s
horrors turned out to be true: his close friend, Michael Crow, was indeed
an FBI informer.209 Moreover, a rational person in Breeden’s shoes could
feel that people are out to get him. It is not difficult to imagine that some
affluent people, with Breeden-esque lifestyles, replete with a fleet of elite
cars, a stash of recreational drugs, and a flair for hosting wild parties,
might be encircled by false friends and flatterers, who, while using them,
secretly wish them ill. Although Breeden was eccentric and perhaps even
a bit “touched,” not all would agree that he was insanely deluded under a
legal definition.
The Breeden court’s determination that the disposition was not the
product of insane delusions is just as debatable. In Honigman, the
contestant won despite countervailing proof that the insane delusion did
not affect the will.210 In Breeden, however, the contestants lost despite
convincing evidence of a causal nexus between Breeden’s delusions and
his will.211 That is, quite a few of Breeden’s putative delusions were
directed at his family, the very people excluded from the will.212 Breeden
thought that his father had planted drugs and that family members spied on
him, and hid drugs, bombs, and listening devises in his house and cars.213
Even without resorting to the less demanding Honigman approach to
causation, the Breeden court could have easily opined that Breeden’s
207
See Donald G. McNeil, Jr., They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists, N.Y.
TIMES, Aug. 31, 2010, at D1 (discussing delusions formed by people who have come into
contact with bed bugs).
208
See Elaine Sciolino, Europe Union Finds Bugging of Offices of 5 Nations, N.Y.
TIMES, Mar. 20, 2003, at A9 (discussing the discovery of listening devices at a European
Union headquarters building).
209
See Respondent’s Answer Brief at 22 n.8, Breeden v. Stone (In re Estate of
Breeden), 992 P.2d 1167 (Colo. 2000) (No. 98 SC 570), 1999 WL 33748234 at * 5. In that
filing, the proponents of Spicer Breeden’s holographic will argued that Breeden’s delusions
were not so bizarre, noting that “[m]edia reports since Spicer Breeden’s death have
confirmed, however, that Michael Crow was indeed a government informant at all times
when the Breedens allege that Spicer’s ‘insane delusions’ about Michael Crow occurred.”
Id.
210
Honigman, 168 N.E.2d at 679.
211
Breeden, 992 P.2d at 1174.
212
Id.
213
Id.
2012]
DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
229
delusions induced him to disinherit his family. In the non-bizarre cases,
the decision makers reach inconsistent and questionable results. Readers
are as uncomfortable with these as they are with Dostoevsky’s protagonist,
Golyadkin.
III. DOSTOEVSKY DEBUNKS THE MENTAL CAPACITY AND INSANE
DELUSION DOCTRINES
Golyadkin could be a typical testator in one of the sound mind or
delusion cases. In The Double, Dostoevsky makes the readers into
effectual fact-finders, charged with the task of deciding whether his
“hero”214 is mentally ill or insanely deluded. The author intentionally
dooms the readers to shake their heads, admit defeat, and concede inability
to reach a unanimous verdict.
A. The Double: The Story
For those who have not read The Double, what follows is a summary,
preceded by an apology: namely, all or some of the events in the story
might not have happened.215 In short, there might be no story at all.
In the novel, Golyadkin is a “minor civil servant,” with two “love”
interests—one past, one present.216 In the present is Klara Olsufevna, the
daughter of a high official and a woman who appears unattainable.217 She
seems to prefer and even be engaged to someone else, who happens to be
the nephew of Golyadkin’s superior.218 In the murk of Golyadkin’s past
there is Karolina Ivanovna, a German woman.219 What is not clear, but
only hinted at, is that Golyadkin had been Karolina’s tenant.220 It seems
that after promising to marry her, Golyadkin absconded and remained in
her debt.221 This scandal, which Klara and her father might have known,
214
Dostoevsky repeatedly calls Golyadkin “our hero.” DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at
30, 31, 57, 81, 90, 116, 144.
215
See Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 225–26 (“Despite repeated textual assurances that
the story unfolds over the course of four days, day four looks suspiciously like day one.”).
216
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 3, 17, 26.
217
Id. at 36–37.
218
Id. at 28, 118.
219
Id. at 17.
220
Id. at 89.
221
Id.
230
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could be one of the reasons why Golyadkin is disqualified as Klara’s
potential suitor.222
The story, spanning a mere four days, opens with Golyadkin waking
up in a dingy room, one prefiguring a Raskolnikov chamber.223 That
morning, Golyadkin hires a carriage, visits his physician Doctor
Rutenspitz, and complains, “I have enemies. I have deadly enemies who
have sworn to ruin me . . . .”224 Doctor Rutenspitz tells him not only to
take his medicine but also to get out more, to “[g]o to theatres, go to a club,
and in any case don’t be afraid of an occasional glass.”225
After leaving Doctor Rutenspitz, Golyadkin decides to attend Klara’s
birthday party and “shops” for the party at the arcade.226 Darting from
store to store he fondles all sorts of expensive merchandise and promises
various shop keepers that he will return later or send for the coveted
item.227 Golyadkin ends up with a pair of gloves and a bottle of perfume,
costing just one and a half roubles.228
222
Id. at 119.
Id. at 3. (describing the room as “messy green walls . . . begrimed with soot and dust,
. . . [a] mahogany chest of drawers, . . . imitation mahogany chairs, . . . red painted
table, . . . reddish oilcloth-covered ottoman patterned with sickly green flowers, and lastly
the clothing he had hastily discarded the night before and thrown in a heap onto the
ottoman”). In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s room is “a tiny little cell, about six
paces long, and it presented a most pitiful aspect with its grimy, yellow wallpaper that was
everywhere coming off the walls; it was so low-ceilinged that to a person of even slightly
above-average height it felt claustrophobic, as though one might bang one’s head against
the plaster at any moment.” FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 35 (David
McDuff trans., Penguin Books 2003) (1866). See also RONNER, supra note 6, at 111 (2010)
(“This hovel, in fact, takes on a life (or rather death) of its own: [Dostoevsky] reminds [the
reader] repeatedly of the tomb’s stifling wretchedness and we see that it is something that
Raskolnikov detests and yet clings to for refuge.”); Gary Saul Morson, Axes to Grind: A
Russian Literature Scholar Reflects on the Interiors of Crime and Punishment, INTERIORS,
May 1999, at 142 (asserting that the “awful room” equals Raskolnikov’s “sordid state of
mind” and that “[i]n Dostoevsky, dirty yellow is the color of mental illness, and lying on the
couch feeds Raskolnikov’s nervous, irritable condition and his mad dreams”).
224
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 14.
225
Id. at 11.
226
Id. at 18–19.
227
Id. at 19.
228
Id. at 20.
223
2012]
DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
231
Klara’s party is a big event and anyone of importance will attend.229 It
is a formal ball hosted by Klara’s father, who is Golyadkin’s former
patron.230 Although Golyadkin was not invited, he shows up in formal
attire with a rented carriage, two horses, and a livery for his servant,
Petrushka.231 The footman who opens the door, however, tells Golyadkin
that he is not welcome.232 After a bout of indecision, Golyadkin enters,
marches up to Klara, and brazenly insists on dancing with her.233 When
Klara screams, others rush to extricate her, and Golyadkin is ignominiously
ejected into the “chill blast” of the street.234
From there, Golyadkin’s evening proceeds to get worse. As he
wanders in anguish and even considers suicide, he has an uneasy feeling
that someone is stalking him.”235 When he gets a better look, he sees
someone “dressed and muffled exactly like [him] from head to
foot . . . scuttling along . . . with the same short rapid step.”236 When
Golyadkin corners this “late-night companion” and tries to initiate
conversation, the stranger initially rebuffs him but later ends up in
Golyadkin’s flat “sitting on his bed.”237
The plot is interrupted and jumps to Golyadkin waking up in the
morning.238 The Double is gone.239 Despite his “strong presentiment of
something being not quite right,” Golyadkin nevertheless dons his
“uniform jacket” and goes to work.240 At work, he sees a new clerk who
happens to be his Double from the night before.241 As it turns out, the
229
Id. at 26–27.
Id. at 26.
231
Id. at 5–6, 23.
232
Id. at 23.
233
Id. at 31–33, 35.
234
Id. at 35.
235
Id. at 39–41.
236
Id. at 41.
237
Id. at 42–44.
238
Id. at 44.
239
Id. at 44–45.
240
Id. at 46.
241
Id. at 47–49. Dostoevsky at times refers to Golyadkin as “Senior,” “Golyadkin I,”
and “elder Golyadkin,” among other names. He also refers to the Double as “Junior,”
“Golyadkin II,” and “new Golyadkin.” This may be an effort to nudge the readers toward
the conclusion that the two are also one. However, to eliminate confusion in this analysis,
(continued)
230
232
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Double’s name is also Golyadkin.242 At the end of the work day, the
Double introduces himself to Golyadkin and is invited for dinner.243
Petrushka admits both master and guest, helps them off with their
coats, and serves them a meal.244 Golyadkin, who had been quite fearful
and suspicious of the Double, is now “moved” and “genuinely touched” by
his guest’s sad story.245 Golyadkin, “[f]orgetting his recent misgivings,”
becomes drunk, confesses his darkest secrets to the Double, and lets him
sleep over.246 The next morning, the Double is gone and Golyadkin regrets
his effusive divulgence of the night before.247
When Golyadkin goes to work the next day he meets the Double in the
antechamber, but now things have changed, including the Double.248 The
Double is no longer the modest, grateful guest of the night before, but has
become icy and indifferent.249 Not only does the Double snub Golyadkin,
but he bustles about the office like an arrogant, ruthless careerist.250 The
Double plays devious tricks on Golyadkin and recruits colleagues to
witness the “perfidious[] abuse.”251
The next day, Golyadkin awakens “stark frozen with horror”; he heads
off to the office, but decides not to enter.252 Instead, Golyadkin, meeting a
colleague outside, learns that he is going to lose his job and that another
official occupies his desk.253 It is almost dark when Golyadkin ventures
into his office.254 When he approaches his co-workers he is “unpleasantly
struck by a certain iciness, abruptness,” and the Double, now the popular
fixture, again “treacherously insult[s]” and humiliates Golyadkin.255
the author refers only to Golyadkin and the Double. Other quoted and translated material
may reference other names to be applied accordingly.
242
Id. at 50.
243
Id. at 55–56.
244
Id. at 56–59.
245
Id. at 59.
246
Id. at 59, 61–62.
247
Id. at 64–65.
248
Id. at 66.
249
Id. at 66–67.
250
Id.
251
Id. at 70, 72–73.
252
Id. at 95, 97.
253
Id. at 97, 100.
254
Id. at 103.
255
Id. at 104–05.
2012]
DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
233
While wandering around later, Golyadkin discovers a love letter from
Klara Olsufevna in his pocket.256 In her letter, Klara begs Golyadkin to
“save” her and meet her at her house so that they can elope.257 In
obedience, Golyadkin hires a carriage and goes to Klara’s house, where
another party is taking place.258 When Klara fails to appear, Golyadkin
waits outside under the “soothingly protective shadow of the
woodstack.”259 Suddenly, house curtains are drawn back and Golyadkin,
who is noticed, is led inside.260 While the Double gives Golyadkin a
“treacherous friend smile” and a “quick mischievous wink to all around,”
others stare at Golyadkin with curiosity, kindness, and compassion.261 The
guests are all expecting someone who is supposedly en route.262 That man
happens to be Doctor Rutenspitz, who arrives, guides Golyadkin by the
hand, puts him in a closed carriage, and whisks him off to an insane
asylum.263 Golyadkin “[gives] a scream and clutche[s] his head.”264
B. The Double: The Critics
The Double has ignited debate and Golyadkin’s mental condition is the
big question mark. What many critics ask is whether there exists an
objectively real Double.265 While some vote “yes” and others “no,” the
lack of consensus fits the author’s subject: indeterminate truth.266
Some literary critics, seeking to place The Double in temporal context,
try to explain why the novel was not well received at first, and some even
view it as a setback in Dostoevsky’s early career.267 In 1845, Dostoevsky
256
Id. at 118.
Id.
258
Id. 126, 131–33.
259
Id. at 137.
260
Id. at 137–39.
261
Id. at 142.
262
Id. at 141.
263
Id. at 142–43.
264
Id. at 144.
265
See supra note 18 and accompanying text (discussing the scholarly debate over the
existence of the Double).
266
See supra note 18 and accompanying text.
267
See, e.g., JONES, supra note 5, at 48 (speaking of the pre-Siberia period, he states that
although “Poor People[ had] relative success—critics loved it, the general public enjoyed it
moderately— . . . The Double’s discipline was stricter, and it failed”); Chizhevsky, supra
note 5, at 112 (“The first version . . . received rather unfavorable criticism, and until
(continued)
257
234
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made his debut with Poor Folk, an epistolary novel featuring Devushkin, a
poor government clerk, and Varenka, a younger woman who is an
impoverished orphan.268 Although Devushkin and Varenka are neighbors,
they communicate in letters through which readers share their past
melancholy lives, unrequited yearnings, and dire poverty.269
This first novel was rooted in the naturalistic tradition of the 1840s and
instantly became a hit, with critics deifying its young author as a nouveau
Nicolai V. Gogol.270 Before Gogol, the fictional underdog had been
stereotyped as a buffoon, the subject of ridicule, and an object of charity.271
Gogol, however, broke ground with The Overcoat by portraying such poor
souls as human beings worthy of dignity in their own right.272 With the
recently was considered an unoriginal work . . . .”); Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 217–18
(explaining that “[a]t least part of the reason for the negative critical reception accorded The
Double can be attributed to the author himself . . . [who] expressed grave doubts about the
form . . . ”); Rosenthal, supra note 4, at 60 (“The story was deeply disturbing to
Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, and both public and critics rejected it.”); Trubeckoj, supra
note 17, at 161 (explaining how the stories published after Poor Folk “caused some
disappointment”).
268
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, POOR FOLK (David McDuff trans., 1988) (1846) in POOR
FOLK AND OTHER STORIES 1–129 (Penguin Classics 1988) (1846). See also Trubeckoj,
supra note 17, at 150 (discussing how Dostoevsky “made his debut with Poor Folk, a novel
in letters”).
269
See Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at 150–51.
270
David McDuff, Introduction, to POOR FOLK AND OTHER STORIES xi (Penguin
Classics 1988) (“‘A new Gogol has appeared!’ Nekrasov shouted, as he entered Belinsky’s
study holding the manuscript of Poor Folk.”); Harrison, supra note 5, at 4 (Dostoevsky
“appropriate[s] . . . motifs and stylistic mannerisms of Nikolai Gogol, for which Dostoevsky
was even accused of plagiarism”), 77 (a “new Gogol”); Victor Terras, Problems of Human
Existence in the Works of the Young Dostoevsky, 23 SLAVIC REV. 79, 80 (1964) (“Poor Folk
is explicitly an echo of, and a reply to, Gogol’s Overcoat.”); Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at
158 (explaining how Devushkin in Poor Folk “correspond[s] to . . . [the] Gogolian
depiction of a small government clerk”). But see JONES, supra note 5, at 31 (“[M]uch has
been made of Poor People’s debt to Gogol’s story, The Overcoat. This is a different kettle
of fish. People are fond of quoting [Dostoevsky ] as saying ‘We have all come out of
Gogol’s Overcoat’. He probably didn’t [say that].”).
271
David Magarshack, Introduction to NICOLAI V. GOGOL, THE OVERCOAT AND OTHER
TALES OF GOOD AND EVIL 8 (W.W. Norton & Co. 1965).
272
Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at 159–60 (“The lowly clerk was canonized by the
naturalistic school as the hero of its short stories. But he was characterized purely
(continued)
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
235
publication of Poor Folk, the critics, especially renowned Visarion
Belinsky, felt that it tipped its hat to the Gogolian conception of literature
as capturing society and disclosing social ills.273 Poor Folk thus installed
Dostoevsky —at the tender age of twenty-four—as hero, master, and head
of a literary school.274
After Poor Folk “giveth,” The Double, “taketh away,” and thus, in
artistic peripeteia, The Double catapulted to failure.275 Many readers hated
it and Belinsky, in his 1846 review, felt it was boring and redundant.276
Although initially deflated, a more mature Dostoevsky conceded that he
himself had qualms about The Double.277 Approximately thirty years later
in Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky said:
This story positively didn’t succeed for me, but the idea
was rather lucid, and I have never pursued anything in
literature more serious than this idea.
But the
form . . . didn’t succeed at all. I revised it completely
externally as a comic figure. Gogol’s ‘Cloak’ discovered a new side to this figure, one that
aroused pity. As a poor human being, socially neglected but pitiable, he appeared in a new
light.”).
273
See David McDuff, supra note 270, at xi (describing Belinsky’s enthusiasm over
Poor Folk).
274
See, e.g., Harrison, supra note 5, at 77–78 (describing Poor Folk as a “resounding
success with readers and critics who saw the author as the new herald of Natural School
social realism”). But see id. at 78 (explaining that the “praise of [Poor Folk] was not
unmitigated”); McDuff, supra note 270, at xiv (“When Poor Folk was finally published in
the St. Petersburg Almanac for January 1846, its reception by the critics was far less
positive than might have been expected after the furore of interest and publicity that had
been whipped up by Belinsky’s sudden enthusiasm.”).
275
See, e.g., Chizhevsky, supra note 5, at 112 (discussing the “unfavorable criticism” of
The Double and how it was considered “an unoriginal work, influenced either by Gogol’s
Overcoat or his Nose”). See also supra note 267 and accompanying text (noting the critics
that viewed it as a setback).
276
JONES, supra note 5, at 48 (pointing out that readers were “puzzled or bored”);
Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 217 (“In a February 1846 review of The Double for Notes of the
Fatherland, Visarion Belinskij criticized the redundancy of Dostoevskij’s tangled web of
dreams, impostors, and mirror images. While expressing admiration for individual
incidents in the novel, he declared that . . . [it] wearies and bores.”).
277
See Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 218.
236
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fifteen years later . . . but even then I was again convinced
that it wasn’t successful.278
Later critics also flummoxed by the novel’s form and trying to get a
handle on that “serious” idea fall into four overlapping categories. In the
first category, there are scholars such as Professor Victor Terras who see
The Double “as a psychological experiment concerning some problem of
human existence.”279 For Professor Terras, the main character “in Poor
Folk is cast in the role of a sentimental lover,” while the “thoroughly
prosaic, ‘ordinary,’ trivial Golyadkin in The Double develops a
Doppelgänger complex” which flouts romantic conventions.280 Professor
Terras sees the Doppelgänger complex as Dostoevsky’s portrayal of
“[h]uman existence . . . [which is] a loud and ugly dissonance between
what man is trying to be and what he is.”281 The Double may also subsume
another broader, unresolved “dissonance” between subjective and objective
“facts.”282
In the second category, there are scholars who see The Double as
commentary on literature, or more precisely, as an insult to the votaries of
naturalism. According to Professor David Gasperetti, early critics such as
Belinsky misunderstood when they “failed to see . . . that there indeed is a
method to the madness of The Double” and that the novel “succeeds quite
278
Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 217–18 (quoting FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Diary of a
Writer (November 1877)). See also JONES, supra note 5, at 83–84 (discussing
Dostoevsky’s dissatisfaction with the novel and the entry in his Diary). Dostoevsky,
dissatisfied with the novel, tried to revise it and produced another version in 1866. Id. at
60–65 (discussing differences between the 1846 and 1866 versions); Harrison, supra note 5,
at 195–211 (analyzing the projected revisions to The Double). The 1866 version was
subtitled A Petersburg Poem and Dostoevsky “removed the summarizing sentences at the
beginning of each chapter,” but “[i]n the final accounting, few changes were made to the
test itself.” Id. at 202–03.
279
Terras, supra note 270, at 80.
280
Id. at 79. Terras states: “[W]here the struggle between truly ‘romantic’
Doppelgängers would reflect a struggle between heaven and hell, the struggle between the
two Goliadkins is only a wretched intrigue, carried on by two underlings for nothing more
than a snug little job. What difference does it make, which of the two—or if either—
occupies a desk at the ‘department’ . . . ?” Id. at 84. See also Harrison, supra note 5, at 18–
29 (discussing the “Doppelgänger Motif”).
281
Terras, supra note 270, at 90.
282
See DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 44–45 (describing that Golyadkin questions
whether the appearance of his Doppelgänger was “a delirious fancy” or objectively real).
2012]
DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
237
well if [viewed] as a challenge to the literary competence demanded of
those who read the fiction of the Natural School.”283 Dostoevsky was not
just a writer, but also a voracious reader, immersed in literature from all
over the globe.284 Professor Gasperetti suggests that in The Double
Dostoevsky exploited and parodied naturalist devices to intentionally
agitate readers and dare them to reassess their own literary values.285
Although this analysis is quite sensible, it too could be expanded.
Dostoevsky sought to provoke readers to not only question literary
“allegiances” but also to mistrust their allegiance to the existence of an
objective reality.
In the third category, some scholars foist Golyadkin’s distraught
psyche under a microscope.286 They disagree not only on the name tag to
pin on Golyadkin’s inner demons but also on the degree of blame to
impute to the oppressive social order of the day.287 Some Dostoevsky
scholars suggest that The Double depicts middle-class socio-economic
striving, which inevitably leads to the pulverization of human
consciousness.288
For Nikolaj S. Trubeckoj, Golyadkin’s flaw is
“ambition”—his burning desire “to get ahead in his career, climb higher,
be more than he actually is”—which collides with his inferiority
complex.289 Lonny Roy Harrison, labeling Golyadkin’s stress as “moral
283
Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 217.
Id.
285
Id. (“Confronted with a set of literary conventions that seem to be as empty as
[Golyadkin] himself, readers are forced to re-evaluate their allegiance to the fiction of the
Natural School.”).
286
See, e.g., JONES, supra note 5, at 70 (calling The Double “a study in selfhood” and
stating that “[t]he affair of Golyadkin [] and [the Double] . . . can be transposed into the
language of self-identity and self-alienation”); Kohlberg, supra note 15, at 350 (analyzing
how The Double “offers a compelling picture of psychopathology”); Rosenthal, supra note
4, at 59 (“The Double is about an individual’s failure to develop and maintain his own sense
of himself”); Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at 162 (Golyadkin’s “whole state of mind is that of
a diseased person” and “[h]is illness develops further, and soon he suffers from
hallucinations”).
287
Compare, e.g., Harrison, supra note 5, at ii (calling the problem “moral selfawareness” and ascribing its source to the pressures of nineteenth century social and work
politics) with Kohlberg, supra note 15, at 350 (describing the problem as one of
persecution, or dualism, personal to the author).
288
See infra notes 289–90 and accompanying text.
289
Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at 161–62.
284
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self-awareness,” says “that the protagonist’s will to succeed in the civil
bureaucratic order of nineteenth-century Petersburg is incompatible with
his implicit need to find moral rectitude.”290 Harrison further claims that
Golyadkin’s “[e]go-driven motivations provide contrapuntal tensions to
exacerbate his experience of inner division.”291 These analyses, parsing the
tension between inner desires and the social order, are illuminating and
interesting. What they fail to do, however, is locate a fence between the
inner and outer, between Golyadkin’s illusions and actual occurrences. In
short, these critics do not attempt to do what Dostoevsky claims is
impossible.
The last category of critics brand Golyadkin “insane” and either track
his descent into madness or psychoanalyze him.292 In an early article, Otto
Rank, a Freud disciple, saw The Double as a “classic portrayal of a
paranoid state.”293 Decades later, Doctor Lawrence Kohlberg, dissenting
from Rank and the “popular-psychiatry” concept of “split personality,”
diagnosed Golyadkin with “autoscopic syndrome.”294 Doctor Kohlberg
illustrates the syndrome by recounting an interview with an autoscopic
patient, Mrs. A., who communes with her duplicate:
[S]he had been visited almost daily by her “astral body,”
as she called it, mostly at dusk when she was alone. Of the
double she says, “In a detached intellectual way I am fully
aware that my double is only a hallucination. Yet I see it;
I hear it; I feel it with my senses. Emotionally I feel it as a
living part of myself. It is me split and divided.”295
290
Harrison, supra note 5, at ii. Temira Pachmuss calls the combatants “the spiritual”
and “animal” facets of human nature. Temira Pachmuss, The Theme of Vanity in
Dostoevskij’s Works, 7 THE SLAVIC AND E. EUR. J. 142, 142 (1963). For her, The Double
reflects a “[a] main concern in Dostoevskij’s fiction . . . [with] the moral decay of the
individual which springs from the neglect of his spiritual being.” Id. She concludes that
Golyadkin’s ensuing insanity is a result of his neglect of “all interests other than the
gratification of his ambitious ego.” Id. at 144.
291
Harrison, supra note 5, at ii.
292
See infra notes 293–99 and accompanying text.
293
Kohlberg, supra note 15, at 350. See also OTTO RANK, THE DOUBLE: A
PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY 27 (Harry Tucker, Jr. trans., University of North Carolina Press
1971).
294
Kohlberg, supra note 15, at 352–53.
295
Id. at 354.
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
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Doctor Kohlberg links Golyadkin’s double to those envisioned by
“autoscopic patients” which he, in turn, ties to autoscopic episodes
sometimes experienced by individuals “with severe epilepsy of the sort
known to have affected Dostoevsky.”296
Unlike Doctor Kohlberg, who finds biographical support for his
diagnosis, Doctor Richard J. Rosenthal, confining himself to the four
corners of the novel, turns to Freudian and post-Freudian psychology.297
For Doctor Rosenthal, projection is the novel’s central metaphor, which he
defines as a mechanism where “unacceptable aspects of the self are
disavowed and attributed to some person or group or some other part of the
external world.”298 Doctor Rosenthal delves into Golyadkin’s narcissistic
nightmare “in which his every step produces yet another Golyadkin until
there is a multitude of doubles mocking and displacing him,” which is a
“descriptive-representational
dream
of
ego
disruption
and
fragmentation.”299
These takes on The Double, rooted in psychiatry and Freud, are
fascinating but leave much unsaid. Yes, Golyadkin could be mad,
paranoid, schizophrenic, bipolar, or split. Yes, he could suffer from
autoscopic syndrome, be projecting, or jousting with oedipal rivals who
menace his paternal fiefdom.300 On the other hand, Dostoevsky informs
his readers that little to nothing is clear-cut and that mental anguish defies
nomenclature. The author purposely leaves open the most terrifying
prospect of all—namely, that nothing is wrong with Golyadkin. In short,
through the literary techniques of intentional obfuscation and retraction,
296
Id.
Rosenthal, supra note 4, at 59–61.
298
Id. at 61 (“It’s not I who is ambitious, angry, unfaithful, etc. it is he.”).
299
Id. at 65. Doctor Rosenthal also sees The Double as a “story of intrusiveness and
usurpation [that] can also be taken up from an oedipal point of view.” Id. at 73. He notes
that while the oedipal myth entails a “child’s precocious intrusion into parental territory,” it
houses a subset “of retaliatory fantasies, one of which is of a younger sibling coming along
and usurping the child’s place with the beloved parent.” Id. According to Doctor
Rosenthal, Golyadkin’s former benefactor is one of Golyadkin’s “symbolic fathers,” and
Klara, along with Semyonovich, the soon to be son-in-law, become symbolic “sibling
rivals” in Rosenthal’s analysis. Id. After the symbolic father’s rejection, Golyadkin tries to
reconstruct the lost relationship with the Double, who, now the persecutor, “lives on as an
object of terror” and mutates into the “ultimate rival,” accelerating Golyadkin’s
disintegration. Id. at 74–75.
300
See supra notes 294–99 and accompanying text.
297
240
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Dostoevsky creates a character who is the unremarkable homo sapiens
doubling as sane-insane.
C. The Double: Indeterminate Reality
Although some critics see The Double as an individual’s progressive
descent into madness, a close read reveals stasis in that Golyadkin does not
change: he is the same Golyadkin before he meets his Double, when he
meets his Double, and after he meets his Double. In all three stages,
Dostoevsky compels readers to endure (not just read about) stagnation and
agonizing uncertainty in a world lacking demarcations between reality and
hallucination.
1. Pre-Double
When readers first meet Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, “a minor civil
servant,” the author uses the devices of intentional obfuscation and
redundant retraction, which persist throughout the novel.301 Dostoevsky
muddles facts, and when something appears to happen he instantly takes it
back,302 leaving readers to wonder if it or anything happened at all.
When his hero first opens his eyes, he is “like a man as yet uncertain
whether he is awake or still asleep, whether all at present going on about
him is reality or a continuation of his disordered dreams.”303 The first clue
is that the awakened and dream states blend, thus undermining
assumptions that these are separate domains. The Double, however, goes
further than that by dissolving any boundary between the inner life of the
mind and objects of the outside world.
Dostoevsky essentially used and collapsed a poetic device later coined
the “objective correlative.”304 According to T.S. Eliot, “[t]he only way of
expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding . . . a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion.”305 Golyadkin’s room in the tenement house in St. Petersburg is
an “objective correlative” where furnishings, and even daylight, comprise
the “formula [for his] particular emotion.”306 Golyadkin’s things are
301
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 3.
See id.
303
Id.
304
See T.S. ELIOT, Hamlet 48 (1919), reprinted in SELECTED PROSE OF T.S. ELIOT 45,
48 (Frank Kermode ed., Harcourt Brace 1975) (first using the term).
305
Id.
306
Id.
302
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
241
personified as objects that “look[] back at him familiarly,” and “the foul
murky, grey autumnal day peer[s] in at him through the dirty panes in . . . a
sour, ill-humoured way.”307
Dostoevsky anthropomorphizes the
surroundings, which reflect Golyadkin’s reluctance to leave “recentlyended slumbers” and the fact that “something untoward had happened.”308
Typically, though, objective correlatives are tied to the premise that
inanimate things out there do exist, and for this reason they can symbolize
something separate but inner, such as emotions or moods.309 The Double,
however, obliterates the underlying premise. Exterior and interior, no
longer distinct components in a poetic equation, become inextricably
conjoined for Golyadkin.
Golyadkin has radical mood swings. On day one, Golyadkin embarks
in a “sky-blue carriage” in mirth, emitting a “gleeful outburst” of laughter,
which “immediately” shifts into “a most unpleasant sensation.”310
Although this shift may seem inexplicable, it could be explained as a
stroke of bad luck. At the time, Golyadkin is engaged in a charade in
which he is all gussied up with new boots, “an almost new pair of trousers,
a shirt front with little bronze buttons, . . . a waistcoat brightly adorned
with nice little flowers . . . [and] a speckled silk cravat.”311 He hired a ritzy
carriage “emblazoned with some sort of coat of arms” and plays his fantasy
role of the respected gentleman, the sort of man he envies and would like
to be.312 In the throes of his “high,” however, an incident whacks him over
the head, reminding him of his own limitations.313
The incident is especially traumatic because Golyadkin is plagued with
unrequited ambition. He, like others, is driven to excel and rise above his
station, but he cannot realize this.314 While Golyadkin desperately wants to
be confident, assertive, popular, glib, and slick, he is shackled to his own
nature, which is shy, modest, cautious, irresolute, fearful, and
307
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 3.
Id.
309
Cf. ELIOT, supra note 304, at 48 (defining objective correlative).
310
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 6–7.
311
Id. at 6.
312
Id.
313
Id. at 7 (Golyadkin encounters two colleagues who call out to him in a “very
unbecoming” and “[u]ncouth” fashion just as Golyadkin’s superior passes in his own
coach).
314
Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at 161–62.
308
242
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embarrassed.315 As Trubeckoj puts it, this is the “cleavage [that] leads to a
constant inner struggle, a struggle against his inferiority complex,” which
is “the strongest motivating force in his life.”316 Golyadkin can only attain
his lofty aspirations through costumes, props, hired coaches, and make
believe.317
Golyadkin’s spirits plummet on day one when he is caught red-handed
in his masquerade. Two work colleagues and Andrey Filippovich, his
department head, spot the underling in his highfalutin garb and hired
coach.318 Golyadkin, who is “suddenly petrified,” turns red “up to the
ears,” gropes for a response, and then, tipping his hat to Andrey
Filippovich, says, “It really isn’t me, it isn’t me, and that’s all there is to
it.”319
Golyadkin’s utterance is both a literal-figurative double entendre and
key to the novel. On one level, it conveys to Filippovich that the uppity
specimen in the carriage is a sham and not the person he really is. On
another level, it suggests that perhaps no one is who they say they are.
More broadly, it intimates to readers that the novel contains no tangible
reality and that what readers think they see or know, they might not
actually see or know. Right after his words to Filippovich, the author
suggests that there was silence because Golyadkin regrets the fact that he
did not respond or did not speak to his department chief.320 There may
have been talk, or there may have been silence. If readers are to enter the
world of The Double, they must cede to the tension of equal, coexisting,
antipodal “realities.”
After the chance encounter with Fillipovich, Golyadkin, “for his own
peace of mind,” visits Doctor Rutenspitz, his “confessor.”321 In this
meeting, Golyadkin, the embodiment of contradiction, rebuts himself at
every turn.322 Golyadkin (whose Russian name means “naked”) aims to
315
Id.
Id. at 162.
317
Id.
318
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 7.
319
Id. at 7–8.
320
Id. at 8.
321
Id.
322
Id. at 8–9.
316
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243
bare his soul to the doctor but cloaks himself in fictive frocks.323 The very
Golyadkin who had just been frolicking as gentry, defines himself as
“straight and open[]” and states, “[t]he only time I put on a mask is when I
go to a masquerade.”324 In a self-contradiction, Golyadkin tells Doctor
Rutenspitz that he does and does not wear masks.
The session proceeds as a protracted oxymoron. Golyadkin informs
Doctor Rutenspitz that he is “just like anyone else” but soon after
professes, “I am not as other people.”325 Readers look to the objective eye
of Doctor Rutenspitz for a clarification, an anchor on reality, or at least a
preliminary diagnosis. Here too, Dostoevsky purposely disappoints.
Doctor Rutenspitz does not appear beset by Golyadkin and dismissively
recommends medicine, an occasional drink, and fun with friends.326
Doctor Rutenspitz also appears vexed, shoots his patient a “searching
inquisitorial gaze,” says, “[y]ou seem to have wandered a little off the
subject,” and “unpleasantly grimace[s] . . . as if preoccupied with a
After Golyadkin “quite
presentiment of some sort.”327
unexpectedly . . . bursts into tears” with his head “bobbing . . . up and
down, beating his breast with one hand and clutching at the lapel of
[Doctor] Rutenspitz’ coat,” the surprised doctor tries to pacify him.328
Just when the readers think that Doctor Rutenspitz put it in writing that
Golyadkin is mentally ill, Dostoevsky erases it as easily as chalk on a
blackboard. The outburst ends as suddenly as it began, Golyadkin bows
politely, leaves the doctor’s home smiling, and decides he is “the happiest
of mortals.”329 Once again, it is as if nothing happened. The author, not
content to leave it at that, goes further: he retracts the retraction, and when
Doctor Rutenspitz is seen next, he is at his window “gazing rather
curiously at our hero,” possibly thinking that Golyadkin is either mad or en
route to madness.330
323
JONES, supra note 5, at 49 (“The novel’s verbal and formal economy is stated in its
first sentence through its hero’s name, Mr. Golyadkin, Mr. Naked (goli). But the Russian
word also suggests destitution . . . .”).
324
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 13.
325
Id. at 10–11.
326
Id. at 10–11, 15.
327
Id. at 10, 12.
328
Id. at 14.
329
Id. at 18.
330
Id.
244
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Obfuscation and retraction also operate in Golyadkin’s shopping spree.
Golyadkin, who is not wealthy, somehow has a “pleasant sum” of “[s]even
hundred and fifty roubles in notes”—but that too changes.331 While in
Nevsky Prospect, Golyadkin gets smaller denominations from a money
changer.332 Although he loses value on the transaction, “[he] acquir[es]
nevertheless a great number of small notes to swell his pocket-book, which
evidently afford[s] him the keenest satisfaction.”333 Professor Jones
observes: “The standpoint from which there is now more money in that
wallet may not strike the [the reader] as rational, but it happens to be Mr.
Golyadkin’s, and he is pleased, and presumably his money is worth the
pleasure it gives him.”334 As Professor Jones concludes, “[h]owever
irrational, his standpoint has its rationale.”335 What Golyadkin did here
(lose money) is not economically sound, but it is defensible as Golyadkin’s
fair price for his pageant, in which the “poor” clerk struts with an
impressively engorged wallet. Professor Jones is correct that “the
objective sense of money and money’s worth is being undermined,” and
thus, readers must accept the antinomy that the hero is both poorer and
richer at once.336
For Golyadkin, shopping is about posturing. As he runs from shop to
shop, pretending to be “a man with his hands full and a terrible amount to
get through,” he settles on random expensive items.337 After such frenetic
activity, Golyadkin has little to show for it, and it is as if the shopping
spree never occurred.338
331
Id. at 4.
Id. at 19.
333
Id. at 19.
334
JONES, supra note 5, at 49.
335
Id.
336
Id. Professor Jones states: “As the book proceeds and Mr. Golyadkin begins seeing
and hearing and touching things that are unapparent to other people, one recalls the seven
hundred and fifty roubles . . . [Dostoevsky] is relying on his readers to keep the question
alive, and to return to it with the thought that the money may not exist outside Mr.
Golyadkin’s fancy.” Id.
337
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 19–20. He apparently orders “a complete tea and
dinner service for one thousand five hundred roubles, together with a fantastically-shaped
cigar-case and a complete shaving outfit in silver for a similar sum,” plus “furniture for six
rooms, and admire[s] an intricately designed ladies’ dressing-table in the latest style.” Id.
338
Id. at 20.
332
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Lunch follows in a similar vein. Golyadkin, now hungry, dines at a
fine restaurant where he poses at an empty table with a newspaper.339
Then, when “he decide[s] that it was not proper just to sit there, . . . [he]
order[s] a chocolate [drink] that he [does] not particularly want.”340 In
what is the author’s retraction, Golyadkin eats, but neglects to eat.341
While “lunching,” Golyadkin bumps into his two office colleagues.342
Feeling embarrassed, in part because he is putting on airs, Golyadkin
delivers a diatribe which echoes what he might have earlier said to
Filippovich: “You all know me, gentlemen, but up to now you have only
known one side of me, . . . [u]p to the present you have not really known
me, gentleman.”343 Reminiscent of his words to Filippovich, “it really isn’t
me, it isn’t me,” Golyadkin implies that what one sees they might not
see.344 Here, Dostoevsky, developing that “serious” idea, intimates not
only that one might not know his hero but also that one might never really
know anyone.
Before the Double appears, the climax is Klara’s birthday party. When
Golyadkin crashes this “brilliant ball,” the narrator’s voice intercedes: “Let
us rather return to Mr. Golyadkin, the true hero of my veracious
tale . . . [whose] present position . . . [is] curious to say the least.”345
Equivocation follows: “[Golyadkin] also was there, ladies and
gentleman—not at the ball, that is, but very nearly.”346 Here the author
casts doubt on whether Golyadkin is present or “nearly” present or whether
there even exists a party at which he or anyone can be present. After it
appears that Golyadkin is hiding for “nearly three hours on a cold dark
landing,” Dostoevsky, through his narrator, notes that “to explain exactly
what had been happening to him is difficult.”347 The author asks his
readers to accept inexplicability and inexactitude.
Once Golyadkin enters the ballroom, retraction propels and freezes the
narrative. Golyadkin “[sees] one or two other people . . . [o]r rather—he
339
Id.
Id.
341
Id.
342
Id.
343
Id. at 20–21.
344
Id. at 8, 20–21.
345
Id. at 26–27, 30.
346
Id. at 30.
347
Id. at 30–31.
340
246
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[does not].”348 When he clumsily jolts various guests, he, “noticing none
of this, or, more accurately, noticing it,” looks at no one but finds “himself
face to face with Klara.”349 Almost every sentence has in its wake an equal
and opposite jolt of erasure. When Golyadkin makes a fool of himself, he
blurts out, “It’s nothing, nothing, gentleman,” which could also translate
into nothing happened.350
In fact, the whole party could be ersatz. For example, a man with a
proud head of hair could really be “wearing a wig,” which if ripped off,
could expose a head as bare as “a billiard ball.”351 After the servant tries to
cajole Golyadkin into leaving on his own accord by telling him that
someone needs to talk to him, Golyadkin says, “No . . . [y]ou are
mistaken.”352 Mistaken becomes the buzzword, which Golyadkin repeats
as “unpardonably mistaken.”353 Through this, Dostoevsky suggests that
life is one big illusory event in which all people “unpardonably mistaken,”
feign a chuckle and a waltz.354
2. Meeting the Double
Some scholars, like Trubeckoj, feel that Golyadkin only “thinks that he
meets his double,” because “Golyadkin is insane.”355 For Trubeckoj,
Golyadkin is hallucinating: “The cleavage existing in his inner self
materializes,” and the “whole tragedy really takes place in [Golyadkin’s]
consciousness.”356 Although there is good corroboration for his view, there
is equal proof of its diametric opposite—the Double’s authenticity.357
After Klara’s party, Dostoevsky hints at an impending mental
breakdown: the weather is “driving [Golyadkin] . . . out of his mind” while
he seeks to “annihilate himself completely, to return to dust and cease to
be.”358 Sensing that “someone had just been standing right there beside
him,” Golyadkin asks, “[w]hat’s wrong with me . . . [h]ave I gone mad or
348
Id. at 32.
Id.
350
Id. at 33.
351
Id. at 34.
352
Id. at 36.
353
Id.
354
Id. at 36–37.
355
Trubeckoj, supra note 17, at 162.
356
Id.
357
See supra note 18 and accompanying text.
358
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 39.
349
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247
something?”359 As soon as the author makes a case for insanity though, he
recants, because as he first appears, the Double is not a madman’s vision.
He is plainly “illuminated by a nearby lantern,” and when Golyadkin tries
to initiate conversation, he interacts like an extant being.360 That evening,
when the Double heads for Golyadkin’s home, concrete details such as the
ringing of a bell and the sound of an “iron bolt grat[ing] back,” establish
that a corporeal form is crossing the gate enclosing Golyadkin’s
building.361
Then, just when the readers start to credit the Double as genuine,
Dostoevsky reverses. It is a near Herculean task to navigate up
Golyadkin’s dark staircase without “breaking a leg” and then the Double
“dart[s] lightly up the stairs, encounter[s] no difficulties, and show[s]
perfect knowledge of the ground.”362 The Double, who did the impossible,
might be nothing but a phantom. Dostoevsky, however, dispels that
instantly when the Double sits squarely on Golyadkin’s bed as real as real
could be.363
The next morning, skepticism presides. The narrator refers to “the
almost impossible adventures of the whole incredibly strange night” that
“was all so peculiar, incomprehensible and absurd, it all seemed so
impossible even, that really one could hardly credit it.”364 Golyadkin
thinks that “the whole thing . . . [was] a delirious fancy, a momentary
derangement of the imagination or a clouding of the mind”; but then, in a
retractile flash, he feels that “[t]he reality of last night’s walk and to some
extent of what had occurred during that walk, was, moreover,
confirmed . . . .”365 It appears that Petrushka, Golyadkin’s servant, might
have also seen the visitor, because something is eating away at him:
“squint[ing]” around the flat, he seems “even more sullen and
uncommunicative than usual.”366 It is just as feasible, however, that
Petrushka is upset because, having noticed abnormal behavior, he fears his
master’s mental degeneration.
359
Id. at 40–41.
Id. at 42.
361
Id. at 44.
362
Id.
363
Id.
364
Id. at 45.
365
Id.
366
Id.
360
248
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As Golyadkin learns that the Double is the new hire in his office,
Dostoevsky strings the readers along with refutation. Golyadkin takes one
look at his twin and thinks, “[t]he reality of the thing sp[eaks] for itself,”
and then concludes he is dreaming.367 Significantly, the Double is both
“different” from and “identical” to Golyadkin, which causes Golyadkin “to
doubt his own existence.”368 Here what the readers yearn for is an
objective lens and Dostoevsky responds by teasing his readers with a
mixed messenger, Anton Antonovich.
Antonovich tells Golyadkin that the new man’s name is also
Golyadkin and admits detecting a mere “family resemblance.”369 What
this implies is that the Double and Golyadkin are not identical, but just a
tad similar. Pondering “[h]ow could anyone speak of a family resemblance
when here was a mirror image[],” a dissatisfied Golyadkin presses his
friend to reconsider.370 Only when pushed, Antonovich changes his mind:
“Yes. Quite right. Really, the resemblance is amazing, and you’re
perfectly correct—you could be taken for one another. . . . Do you know,
it’s a wonderful—it’s a fantastic likeness, as they sometimes say. He’s you
exactly . . . .”371 The implication here is that the Double and Golyadkin are
veritable clones. Which of Antonovich’s conflicting impressions is
accurate? Dostoevsky leaves that, like everything else, unresolved.
At the end of the work day, the Double, wearing the same outfit as
Golyadkin, follows him home.372 Golyadkin, believing it to be an
“illusion” but deciding that “[i]t was no illusion,” admits that “he had no
idea what was happening to him” and “could not trust his own senses.”373
When they get to Golyadkin’s home, the two clerks sound the same and
even share the Christian name, “Yakov Petrovich.”374 Because of such
coincidences, some critics, such as Mikhail M. Bakhtin, describe the
evening as an inner dialogue where “[t]he [D]ouble speaks in Golyadkin’s
own words, bringing with him no new words or tones,” and echoes “the
367
Id. at 48.
Id. at 48–49.
369
Id. at 50.
370
Id.
371
Id. at 51.
372
Id. at 55.
373
Id. at 55–56.
374
Id. at 57.
368
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
249
cringing and self-effacing Golyadkin.”375 Professor Terras similarly claims
solipsism in the “unspeakable horror about that scene in which Goliadkin
thinks he is entertaining a visitor (the other Goliadkin) and is entertaining
himself!”376 These are viable theories, but Dostoevsky discourages his
readers from taking refuge in them.
Rather, the author makes his readers crave a neutral party to give at
least a hint about whether Golyadkin is talking to a guest or himself.
Unfortunately, the only witness here is the unreliable drunkard Petrushka.
When they both get home, Golyadkin searches Petrushka’s face for a
reaction, but poker-faced Petrushka treats the duplicates as humdrum: he
“show[s] no surprise,” helps both men with their coats, and asks casually
whether he should “bring dinner for two.”377 Conterminously, a distraught
Petrushka is initially “in the doorway, his eyes fixed on the opposite corner
of the room to that in which his master and the guest were sitting,” and
later insubordinately refusing to go to bed.378 Readers cannot tell whether
Petrushka sees dual diners or his boss chirping away at an invisible pal.
3. Post-Double
In stage three, the Double becomes increasingly evasive, and letters to
and from Golyadkin appear and then vanish. In doing so, Dostoevsky
unveils his subject—naked incertitude.
When Golyadkin wakes up to “find not only the guest but also the bed
on which he had slept, gone,” readers suspect that the evening was a
figment of Golyadkin’s imagination or a dream.379 The rebuttal to that
suspicion is Petrushka, who confuses the Double with Golyadkin and
informs his master that “his master . . . [is] not at home.”380 When
Golyadkin rebukes, “I’m your master, Petrushka, you fool,” the servant,
backing off, “announce[s] that the other had left about an hour and a half
ago . . . .”381 Just when the readers feel momentarily secure in assuming
375
MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN, PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS (Caryl Emerson trans.,
University of Minnesota Press 1983), reprinted as The Dismantled Consciousness: An
Analysis of The Double, in DOSTOYEVSKY NEW PERSPECTIVES 19, 24–25 (Robert Louis
Jackson ed., 1984).
376
Terras, supra note 270, at 85.
377
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 56–57.
378
Id. at 57, 63.
379
Id. at 64.
380
Id. at 64–65.
381
Id.
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that Golyadkin entertained a guest, Dostoevsky injects doubt in the form of
spooked Petrushka’s “offensive look” and surly tone.382
At the office, the Double, radically different from the humble, selfdeprecating house guest, embodies what Golyadkin had said to the clerks
earlier in the restaurant: “[U]p to now you have only known one side of
me.”383 Office Double—now cold, unfriendly, and “official and businesslike”—snubs Golyadkin, which makes his “flesh creep.”384 Golyadkin
says to Antonovich, “I’m merely developing the theme, putting forward the
idea that people who wear masks are no longer uncommon, and that it’s
difficult nowadays to recognise the man underneath.”385 Golyadkin’s
comment doubles as Dostoevsky’s gnomic epiphany about the masked,
indiscernible quality of all people and life itself.
The author’s voice intercedes again after boss Filippovich asks
Golyadkin for documents.386 The Double, cunningly duping Golyadkin
into believing that there is a blemish on the paper, offers to extract it for
him with a pen-knife “out of friendship and pure goodness of heart.”387
Instead, the Double snatches the documents, delivers them to the boss, and
garners credit for Golyadkin’s work.388 Golyadkin reflects:
Anything as black as this [is] really quite inconceivable.
It’s nonsense. It can’t happen. It’s probably been some
sort of an illusion—either something different happened
from what actually did—or it was me who went, and
somehow I took myself for someone else. To put it
briefly, the whole thing is impossible.389
This encapsulates the theme. Dostoevsky conveys that events equal
“inconceivable . . . nonsense,” that what happens might not happen or
could be “different . . . from what actually did” happen, and that certainty
spells illusion.390 Going even further, Dostoevsky implodes the paradox,
because as soon as Golyadkin “decide[s] that the whole thing was
382
Id.
Id. at 21.
384
Id. at 66–67.
385
Id. at 68.
386
Id. at 69.
387
Id. at 69–70.
388
Id. at 70.
389
Id. at 71.
390
Id.
383
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
251
impossible,” the Double arrives “with papers in both hands and under both
arms” and affirms the possibility or that what happened actually did
happen.391
Uncertainty intensifies as the Double exploits his popularity to torment
Golyadkin. Golyadkin yearns to revisit the warm “friendship” and “cordial
relationship of the night before.”392 Golyadkin, lonely, pines not just for an
ouster of solitude, but also for a ratification of his reality.393 His hunger,
however, is left unsated as the Double’s skittishness increases, so much so
that he personifies evasive reality. For example, when the Double tricks
Golyadkin into paying for ten fish pasties at the restaurant, the cagey
Double “look[s] as though he might at the least provocation disappear into
the next room and slip out by a back way, foiling all attempts at pursuit.”394
Each time Golyadkin manages to grab and seize the Double, the Double, as
slippery and protean as truth itself, squirms free to defeat capture.395
Another scene further dashes all hope of certitude or clarification.
Trying to mingle with his “icy” colleagues Golyadkin spies the popular
Double who is “[g]ay, smiling, full of beans as ever, nimble-footed,
nimble-tongued” as he “frolick[s], toadie[s], gambol[s], and guffaw[s].”396
Working the room like a seasoned politician the Double turns to shake
Golyadkin’s hand, “tearfully grasp[ing] it in the firmest and friendliest
manner.”397 For a split second, this looks like that coveted change of heart,
a gesture of inclusion.
When the Double “brazenly,
callously . . . snatch[es] his hand away,” the other shoe drops:
Not satisfied with that, . . . [the Double] shook
. . . [Golyadkin’s hand] as if it had been contaminated.
Even worse, he spat, and made a most offensive gesture!
And worst of all, taking out his handkerchief, he wiped
each finger that had momentarily rested in the hand of
Golyadkin []. All the while he looked about him
deliberately, in his usual blackguardly way, so that all
should see what he was doing, and looked everyone in the
391
Id.
Id. at 74–75.
393
Id. 76–77.
394
Id. at 81.
395
See id. at 66 (where Golyadkin “seiz[es] [the Double] by the hand,” the Double darts
away).
396
Id. at 104.
397
Id. at 105.
392
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face in an obvious attempt to convey to them most
unpleasant things about Golyadkin . . . .398
This poses a multi-faceted quandary. Did their friendship and bonding
ever happen? Did the handshake or its retraction even occur?
Elusiveness builds when Golyadkin tries to placate the Double in a
coffee shop. Initially, the Double greets Golyadkin as a “dear good
friend,” shooting him a winning smile.399 Instantly, doing his characteristic
about-face, the Double taunts Golyadkin with allusions to his past, resumes
his “former heinous trick of pinching—regardless of his resistance and
subdued cries—the indignant Mr. Golyadkin’s cheek,” and replays the
retracted handshake.400 Just when it seems that Golyadkin managed to get
him to sit still, the Double bolts, sticks Golyadkin with the bill, and slips
away.401
Flighty malice continues after the Golyadkins leave the coffee shop.
Golyadkin frantically chases his Double and successfully “clamber[s] onto
the carriage, while [the Double] did his utmost to fight him off.”402 At one
point Golyadkin, by “gripping the moth-eaten fur collar of . . . [the
Double’s] overcoat,” has the Double trapped.403 Losing hold once again,
Golyadkin is hurled “from the carriage like a sack of potatoes.”404 The
Double, like a fugitive, repeatedly evades capture.
In the novel, letters similarly materialize and vanish, leaving the
readers to wonder if they ever existed.405 Golyadkin begs the Double to
“restor[e] the status quo ante” in a letter, but when Golyadkin orders
Petrushka to deliver it, Petrushka laughs and then denies laughing.406
Later, when Petrushka returns and his master inquires about the letter,
398
Id.
Id. at 112.
400
Id. at 113, 115.
401
Id. at 115–16.
402
Id. at 116.
403
Id. at 116–17.
404
Id. at 117.
405
See Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 223 (“As disconcerted as readers must be by the
spatial and temporal black holes that cut up The Double, they become even more confused
when force to deal with the five letters that appear in rapid succession near the end of the
novel. One by one each of the letters either cannot be found at a crucial moment or
disappears altogether.”).
406
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 82–83.
399
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
253
Petrushka insists that a letter never existed.407 Readers cannot be sure of
that, however, because the Double mentions the letter while berating
Golyadkin in the coffee shop.408 Occluding truth, Dostoevsky also sheds
doubt on the letter’s recipient. Specifically, when Golyadkin asks his
servant to divulge the Double’s address, Petrushka gives Golyadkin’s
address.409 Golyadkin replies, “[t]hat’s me you’re talking about. There’s
another Golyadkin, and I mean him, you twister!”410 Just as the readers are
on the brink of concluding that Petrushka does not believe in the Double,
Petrushka tells his master that he is quitting so that he can work for “nice
people,” because “[n]ice people don’t live falsely and don’t have
doubles.”411 According to Petrushka, the Double does and does not have
authenticity.
Another apparitional letter suddenly appears.412 Golyadkin, at first
“[d]read[ing] that it might prove an illusion or figment of his imagination,”
later decides it is “no illusion, no figment of the imagination.”413 This
letter, from colleague Vakhrameyev, condemns Golyadkin’s behavior,
calls him a “moral menace,” and severs ties with him.414 Pushing
Golyadkin’s paranoiac buttons, the letter engenders “hideous visions” and
nightmares.415 When Golyadkin awakens, he discovers that the letter is
gone,416 making the readers doubt that it had ever arrived.
Still another letter comes and goes.417 When a porter delivers it to
Golyadkin, he stuffs it in a pocket.418 Later, Golyadkin seats himself at an
inn table and extracts what turns out to be Klara’s elopement letter.419
Klara begs Golyadkin to rescue her from her enemies and tells him: “Await
me in your carriage outside Olsufy Ivanovich’s windows tonight at nine
407
Id. at 86.
Id. at 115.
409
Id. at 87.
410
Id. at 87.
411
Id. at 88.
412
Id. at 89.
413
Id.
414
Id. at 89–90.
415
Id. at 93–95.
416
Id. at 96.
417
Id. at 109, 133.
418
Id. at 109.
419
Id. at 118.
408
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exactly. We are having another ball.”420 While several critics agree that
Klara’s letter is climactic and that Klara herself did not write it, they
disagree over the author’s identity.421 As Professor Jones points out, “[t]he
letter is a noveletteish farrago which suggests the escapist reading of halfeducated clerks like Mr. Golyadkin and Mr. Devushkin,” while it could
also have been the Double or some other clerk’s nasty prank.422 Also,
because Golyadkin habitually talks to himself and the letter mimics his
erratic tone, he could have composed it himself. Another possibility is that
the letter, along with the elopement plot, is totally imagined.423
Dostoevsky ensures that nothing about the Klara letter makes sense.
When Golyadkin “drag[s] out the letter[,]” he, “dazed and incapable of
thought or action,” is “unable to read it.”424 When Golyadkin gropes in his
pocket later, “to his amazement[,] the letter [is] not there.”425 It, like
everything else, disintegrates. The events linked to the letter are equally
mind-boggling. If indeed Klara had connived a secret rendezvous, it is
illogical for her to select the time and venue of a formal ball with so many
guests present.426 Also, nothing appears to go according to plan, which
might be indicative of no plan. Golyadkin waits while Klara fails to
show.427
Significantly, when Golyadkin reads the Klara letter, Dostoevsky
accelerates the obfuscation and retraction, so much so that the narration
becomes feverish. At the inn, Golyadkin does not appear to order food, yet
on his table appear “plates . . . [,] a dirty serviette, and a recently-discarded
knife, fork and spoon.”428 Golyadkin asks himself, “Who’s been eating
420
Id.
See, e.g., JONES, supra note 5, at 88 (“[I]n The Double Mr. Golyadkin has to mount
his own Double Act, which is why the elopement letter is both the novel’s climax and its
central inspiration, embracing the nowhere of the hut on the shore and the nobody of Sir
Golyadkin to the rescue.”).
422
Id. at 54.
423
See Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 226 (suggesting that “[d]ay four for [Golyadkin] is
actually day one for everybody else” and that much of the story, including Klara’s letter, is
imagined).
424
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 123.
425
Id. at 133.
426
See Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 226 (“[W]hy choose a time when so many people are
present to foil their elopement?”).
427
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 137.
428
Id. at 119.
421
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
255
here? . . . Could it have been me?”429 When he asks the waiter, “What do I
owe you, old chap?” the whole place bursts into laughter.430 Golyadkin
and the readers are unsure whether their hero actually ate or whether
tragicomically, he offered to pick up someone else’s tab. As Golyadkin
admonishes, “[a]nything is possible.”431
In the muddle, Golyadkin thrusts his hand into his pocket and extracts
a vial purportedly prescribed by Doctor Rutenspitz, which inexplicably
makes him “shudder[]and almost scream[] with terror.”432 The vial, like
just about everything else, “slip[s] from his grasp” and smashes to the
floor.433 Professor Gasperetti asserts that this scene supports his theory that
“[d]ay four for [Golyadkin] is actually day one for everybody else” and
that all in the interstices is imagined.434 Dostoevsky answers, “maybe,” in
lieu of a committal “yes.” The vial, a metaphor for shattered reality,
correlates with the author’s postulate that truth (temporal and spatial) is
nothing but a dollop of splintered shards on an eating house floor.
When Golyadkin is later led into Klara’s party, he drifts into a haze:
“To say that he went is not, however, strictly accurate, for he had little idea
what was happening to him.”435 When the Doctor Rutenspitz of day one
arrives, he reminds his patient that he is “an old friend,” and Golyadkin
confirms, “I have complete faith in Doctor Rutenspitz.”436 Seconds later,
the reader—leery about the doctor with his “eyes burning with evil and
infernal glee” and who out of the blue speaks with a German accent—
wonders if he is Doctor Rutenspitz.437 Golyadkin expresses his (and the
readers’) thoughts: “This wasn’t [Doctor] Rutenspitz! Who was it? Or
was it him? It was! Not the earlier [Doctor] Rutenspitz, but another, a
429
Id.
Id.
431
Id.
432
Id. at 120.
433
Id.
434
Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 225–26 (“No time has elapsed . . . [t]he credibility of
Klara’s declaration of love, the appearance of the double, and even [Golyadkin’s] blunder at
the party is shattered just as completely as the vial of medicine that bursts on the floor.”).
435
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 139.
436
Id. at 143.
437
Id. at 144. See also JONES, supra note 5, at 103 (“[I]n his first meeting with Mr.
Golyadkin . . . he spoke rather colourless but correct Russian. Whereas now . . . he speaks
the broken Russian of a member of the Petersburg German Colony: ‘You vill official
quarters haf, vith firewood and Licht and service, the vich you deserf not.’”).
430
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terrible [Doctor] Rutenspitz!”438
double.
[40:195
Even Doctor Rutenspitz may have a
D. The Double: Does the Double Truly Exist?
If Golyadkin were a testator in a will contest, charged with having
insane delusions, how might the court rule? Under the majority test, a
delusion is insane even if there is some factual basis for it if a rational
person in the testator’s position could not have drawn the same
conclusion.439 Under the minority view, which is more protective of
testamentary freedom, a delusion is not insane if there is any factual basis
at all for the testator’s belief.440 Although Golyadkin is more likely to fare
better under the minority test, that is not a forgone conclusion. Under
either approach, Golyadkin could get a clean bill of health or an insanity
diagnosis. Stated otherwise, one could argue either for the proponents or
contestants but the outcome is unpredictable.
In the hypothetical Golyadkin matter, readers of this article (the factfinders) could understandably balk at the assigned task because a chunk of
the puzzle—the will itself—is missing; thus, they could object on the basis
that ignorance of the chosen disposition is fatally disabling. If that is what
is stopping the fact-finders from opining on Golyadkin’s mental state, it
substantiates the chief complaint of the critics of the capacity doctrine: the
reason the cases are inconsistent and often skewed is because decisionmakers tend to approach it backwards.441 Rather than deciding the issue of
whether the testator has the requisite sound-mind, they side-step it by
preliminarily (and often clandestinely), fixating on the will contents.442
Then, only after doing that, they predicate their testamentary capacity
finding on whether the will itself coddles their hearts or comports with
normative values.443 The current task, however, is a will contest without a
438
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 144. See also JONES, supra note 5, at 104 (exploring
the possibility that “the second [Doctor] Rutenspitz is a different man”).
439
See generally DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 169 (citing
RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF PROP.: WILLS AND OTHER DONATIVE TRANSFERS § 8.1, cmt. s
(2003)).
440
See DUKEMINIER, SITKOFF & LINDGREN, supra note 19, at 169 (citing Enders v.
Parker (In re Estate of Kottke), 6 P.3d 243 (Alaska 2000)).
441
See, e.g., Champine, supra note 25, at 49.
442
Id.
443
See supra notes 20, 441; Part II.B.2 and accompanying text (discussing the bias and
inconsistency in the non-bizarre delusion cases).
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
257
will; such a scenario forces the readers to relinquish this impulse and
enables the fact-finders to isolate and confront the real issue of whether
Golyadkin is insanely deluded. If the fact-finders stubbornly refuse to play
along, what holds them back is something different. This something is the
real impasse, the one the fact-finders deny, sugarcoat, or repressively inter
in the unconscious vault. It is the one that The Double shoves right in the
fact-finders’ faces.
If Golyadkin even has delusions, they at best fit into the non-bizarre
category. None of his beliefs are “clearly implausible,” but rather they
embrace “situations that [can] occur in real life.”444 In making his hero’s
life so drably prosaic, Dostoevsky has taken great pains to tell his readers
that his “minor clerk,” who visits a doctor, shops, dines, goes to work, and
crashes a party, is not some freakish anomaly.445 Unlike Cecilia Zielinski,
he does not think that people are getting orders from a machine that turns
the world inside out, are sticking balloons in his belly, are pushing his eyes
back into his head, or are breaking his legs and replacing them with
someone else’s legs.446 Unlike the testator in McReynolds v. Smith,447 he is
not zipping off to other planets, befriending aliens, and planning a stone
quarry franchise on Saturn.448
The most aberrant event in Golyadkin’s life is his encounter with the
Double, and even that is not “clearly implausible.”449 In real life, such an
event transpires more than one might expect. The accounts of identical
twins separated at birth who suddenly meet for the first time are
plentiful.450 Cognizant of such encounters, Dostoevsky even has his
444
See supra notes 70–72 and accompanying text (discussing the DSM definitions of
bizarre and non-bizarre).
445
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 3 (noting that Golyadkin is “so insignificant a
character as to be certain of commanding no great attention at a first glance”).
446
Zielinski v. Moculski (In re Estate of Zielinski), 623 N.Y.S.2d 653 (N.Y. App. Div.
1995). See also supra Part II.B.1 (discussing the Zielinski case in greater depth).
447
86 N.E. 1009 (Ind. 1909).
448
Id. at 1012. The McReynolds court found that the evidence established insane
delusion and that the will was “at least in some measure, the result of such delusion.” The
testimony showed that the testator believed, among other things, that he “had personally
visited the planets, formed an acquaintance with their inhabitants,” and learned that “after
death, [he would] go to the planet Saturn and conduct a stone quarry . . . .” Id.
449
See supra notes 76–78 and accompanying text (defining bizarre delusions).
450
See, e.g., Thomas Catan, Spanish Twins Separated at Birth By Mistake Are United
By Chance, THE TIMES (May 28, 2008), http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/
(continued)
258
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[40:195
character Antonovich elaborate on the phenomenon.451 Antonovich,
referring to the generosity of Mother Nature, speculates that both
Golyadkins might come “from the same parts” and says: “[D]on’t you
worry. It’s a thing that does happen. Do you know, I must tell you this,
the very same thing occurred to an aunt of mine on my mother’s side. She
saw her own spit and image before she died . . . .”452
In The Double, Dostoevsky supplies at least a “reasonable basis” 453
for the belief that the Double is genuine. Regarding this issue (the one that
sows the most discord), some scholars such as Harrison feel that the “[t]he
authenticity of the double is never called into question,” and that “[a]ll
secondary characters acknowledge the presence of both Golyadkins,
and . . . do not consider it incredible that the original Golyadkin should
have a perfect double.”454 While equally compelling opponents insist that
the Double is imaginary, a mere hallucination, or projection, scholar
europe/article4016045.ece (detailing a story of twins mistakenly separated at birth who
suddenly meet after a shopkeeper was “taken aback by the unfriendly manner of the woman
who she thought was her friend . . . .”); Rebecca Leung, Twist of Fate, CBS NEWS (Feb. 11,
2009, 8:24 PM), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/04/48hours/main581771.shtml
(detailing a story of woman, who for twenty years, did not know that she had a twin sister
until they met in a fast food parking lot); Becky Sheaves, The Twins Brought Up On Either
Side of the Iron Curtain . . . But Who Lived Identical Lives, MAIL ONLINE (Dec. 20, 2007,
10:54 PM), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-503775 (describing identical twins
who met after the fall of the Berlin Wall); Elizabeth Wolf, Dual Lives of Twins Separated at
Birth, N.Y. POST (Sept. 23, 2007, 5:00 AM), http://www.nypost.com/f/print/regional/
item_4AFadAQePr4GNZdswlhPzM (detailing a story of twins, separated at birth, adopted
by different families, and made the subjects of a secret mental illness study, who thirty-five
years later met in a cafe). See also Rosenthal, supra note 4, at 59 (describing a news story
about a man who strangled his twin brother because he was impersonating him). Rosenthal
opines that this story, published 130 years after The Double, “would have probably pleased
[Dostoevsky], who avidly read the papers of his day for things to write about . . . .” Id.
451
See supra notes 369–71 and accompanying text (describing the dialogue between
Golyadkin and Antonovich in the office).
452
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 51 (emphasis added).
453
See In re Honigman’s Will, 168 N.E.2d 676, 678 (N.Y. 1960) (The court
emphasized that the issue was “not whether Mrs. Honigman was unfaithful, but whether
Mr. Honigman had a reasonable basis for believing that she was.”); Part II.B.2.b (discussing
the Honigman case in greater depth).
454
Harrison, supra note 5, at 121–22. See also supra note 18 and accompanying text
(discussing the scholarly debate over the existence of the Double.).
2012]
DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
259
Deborah Martinsen hits the nail on the head by accepting that the
“text[] . . . contain[s] evidence on both sides.”455
The problem is that each of the novel’s impartial witnesses gives
conflicting testimony. Petrushka, for example, takes two coats and serves
two meals.456 He confuses Golyadkin with the Double and quits because
“[n]ice people . . . don’t have doubles.”457
In contrast, Petrushka,
corroborating the hypothetical contestants’ contention that the Double is
imagined, considers the task of taking Golyadkin’s letter to the Double to
be a joke and claims that both Golyadkins have the same address.458
Witness Antonovich also speaks to both sides by detecting a slight “family
resemblance” between the two and then anointing them veritable clones.459
The very reason the readers cannot confidently convict or acquit the
author’s hero is because objective reality simply does not exist.
Reader discomfort throughout The Double replicates the reaction legal
commentators have to the mental capacity and delusion cases, especially
those that fall into the non-bizarre class. As discussed, unanimous
ratification of the reasoning and result in cases such as Dew, Strittmater,
Honigman, and Breeden is lacking.460 All readers are not wholeheartedly
convinced that Ely Stott, who detested his daughter; pioneer Louisa
Strittmater, who championed feminism; Frank Honigman, who dreaded
cuckoldry; and Spicer Breeden, who was mortified by spying eyes, were
insanely delusional.461 In seeking the cause of their discontent, readers like
to blame the dubious results on differing evidentiary burdens or on judges
455
Martinsen, supra note 18, at 1. For those commentators that see the Double as a
figment of the imagination or a projection of Golyadkin’s anxieties, see, for example,
Chizhevsky, supra note 5, at 115 (asserting that the Double is “conditioned
psychologically” and “rises from the depths of Golyadkin’s soul”). See also supra note 17
and accompanying text (discussing the debate over the authenticity of the Double).
456
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 56–57, 63 (describing Petrushka’s conflicting
reactions to the Double).
457
Id. at 88.
458
Id. at 83, 86–88. See also supra Part III.C.3 (discussing the vanishing letters).
459
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 50–51. Similarly, when Golyadkin later treats
himself to just one “fish pasty,” he is charged for eleven. Id. at 80. It turns out that the
Double ate the other ten fish pasties, but the waiter thought it was Golyadkin himself. Id.
This, of course, suggests that if this happened and if there is a double, they do indeed look
alike.
460
See supra Part II.B.2 (discussing these non-bizarre cases).
461
See supra Part II.B.2 (discussing the uncertainty in the non-bizarre cases).
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or juries who let their own biases and prejudices affect their decisions.462
By implying that such excuses are vacuous, The Double exposes the true
source of such vexation.
The Double dispatches the bitter dictum that when it comes to the
realm of the non-bizarre, the lawyers and proverbial reasonable men and
women are neither capable of defining delusion nor finding that a delusion
caused or might have caused a disposition. The legal profession
brainwashed itself into believing that lawyers can do what Dostoevsky
knew (and was big enough to admit) is not humanly possible. The reason
these cases and the inept stabs at justifying them ring false is because the
lawyers are the ones who are not just deluded, but bizarrely deluded. This
is unfortunate because one salutary goal behind the sound mind
requirement is to promote the perception of law as legitimate.463 The hope
is that the current legal institutions, including those governing succession
of property, will be seen as rational and fairly predictable.464 Specifically,
practitioners would like to be able to sit down with clients and help them
navigate through choices by giving them not just the pros and cons of
venturing forth but also giving them tentative forecasts of closure. When a
potential contestant or proponent walks through the law office door,
however, it is the non-bizarre case that inevitably hobbles the profession
and undermines legitimacy.
Professor Bradley E.S. Fogel, one of the few to offer a respectable
solution, proposes abolishing the insane delusion doctrine altogether and
retaining just the traditional mental capacity test.465 Fogel thinks that even
absent a distinct insane delusion or monomania doctrine, extreme cases
like Zielinski would still result in invalidation.466 He aptly points out that
in cases with people like Cecilia, who falsely believe that those “closest to
[them]” are trying to hurt them in “bizarre ways,” there will likely be a
sufficient showing of their inability to know the natural objects of their
bounty.467 It is worth highlighting that the delusional Cecilias of the world
relentlessly adhere to total impossibility.
462
See supra Part II.B.2 (discussing the bias and the putative effect of different
evidentiary burdens).
463
See supra notes 40–41 and accompanying text.
464
See supra notes 40–41 and accompanying text.
465
Fogel, supra note 20, at 108–09.
466
Id.
467
Id. at 109 (“In Zielinski, testator’s paranoia seems to have prevented the testator
from appreciating her relationship with her son or understanding her obligations to him.”).
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
261
Because there is a discernible tying arrangement between a truly
unsound mind and bizarre delusions, Professor Fogel’s solution does not
go far enough.468 Incorporating DSM science into the mental capacity
inquiry could better safeguard testamentary freedom. Professor Fogel is
correct that instead of jettisoning insane delusion as a distinct basis for will
invalidation the legal system should instead install the sound-mind test as
sole dictator. Going further, it should also engraft onto the old
Greenwood-Baker test an added mandate that a mentally incompetent
testator must also suffer from what the DSM defines as bizarre
delusions.469 In doing so, the law would at least honestly stipulate to its
own limitations and concede that the whole Stott-Strittmater-HonigmanBreeden, and even Golyadkin non-bizarre, group of testators tends to throw
a wrench in the works.470
This suggested revision would continue to minister to the policies
behind the testamentary capacity doctrine.471 As amended, the doctrine
would still aim to ensure that a will speaks true intent, protects the family,
grants peace of mind, and helps shield the elderly from exploitation and
undue influence.472
Additionally, by ousting the inconsistent,
unpredictable, and disingenuous culprit—the non-bizarre delusions—the
updated test would also more effectively help foster the perception of law
as legitimate and essentially rational.473
468
Id. at 418 (suggesting that some delusions can be so “clearly implausible” and “not
understandable” that they can only originate in an unsound mind). See, e.g., Gulf Oil Corp.
v. Walker, 288 S.W.2d 173 (Tex. Civ. App. 1956) (dealing with a testator who had bizarredelusions and the court held that the evidence sustained finding that the decedent lacked
testamentary capacity).
469
See supra note 48 and accompanying text (discussing the Greenwood-Baker test and
its origins); supra notes 48–51 and accompanying text (discussing the sound-mind rule and
how it is designed to be lenient); supra note 69 and accompanying text (describing the core
of insanity as delusion).
470
See supra Part II.B.2 (discussing the body of non-bizarre cases).
471
See supra notes 33–41 and accompanying text (discussing the policies underlying
the testamentary capacity requirement).
472
See supra notes 33–41 and accompanying text (discussing the policies underlying
the testamentary capacity requirement).
473
See supra notes 40–41 and accompanying text (discussing the goal of legitimacy
behind the testamentary capacity rule).
262
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[40:195
IV. CONCLUSION
When a decedent’s will is the product of a bizarre delusion its resultant
invalidation is not particularly earthshaking, and often times most can
agree with the decision.474 For non-bizarrely deluded decedents, however,
the fact-finding task is formidable and the fact-finders (and at times the
courts themselves) cringe at decisions that effectively obliterate a will.475
The general testamentary capacity cases are rife with the same defects—
inconsistency and dubious results—when the contest focuses on an
individual without bizarre delusions.476 For too long, this area of the law
has spawned controversy and discontent.477
From the instant Dostoevsky created The Double, it too brought
controversy and discontent.478 Part of this is attributable to the author’s use
of devices such as intentional obfuscation and retraction, along with his
creation of a world in which the readers cannot be sure what is really
happening and what is mere hallucination. It is not just the uncertainty that
upset readers for more than a hundred and fifty years though. Russian
literature scholars have struggled to explain exactly what it is about this
pre-Siberian masterpiece that makes the readers’ skin crawl. Professor
Gasperetti notes that “this experience of reader discomfort and
alienation . . . lies at the heart of [Dostoevsky’s] self-effacing discourse”
and that “[i]f The Double is successful at no other level, it certainly invites
readers to see themselves in [Golyadkin].”479 Similarly, psychiatrist
Rosenthal allies Golyadkin with the whole human race:
To some extent we all struggle against deep urges to yield
up our identities, to erase separations and differences, and
474
See supra Part II.B.1 (discussing the bizarre cases).
See supra Part II.B.2 (discussing the non-bizarre cases).
476
See supra note 103 and accompanying text (giving an example of inconsistency with
respect to general mental capacity decisions).
477
See supra note 25 and accompanying text; supra Part II.B.2 (giving examples of
questionable non-bizarre cases).
478
See supra notes 17–18 and accompanying text (discussing scholarly response to and
dispute over the novel); supra Part III.B (discussing the critics’ reactions to the novel).
479
Gasperetti, supra note 5, at 231. See also Elliott D. Mossman, Dostoevskij’s Early
Works: The More than Rational Distortion, 10 SLAVIC AND E. EUR. J. 268, 272 (1966)
(explaining that the novel, which “is a split vision [where] [the readers] see both the
external and the internal at the same time . . . unsettles [the readers] because [they] can
never be quite sure which is which”).
475
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DOES GOLYADKIN REALLY HAVE A DOUBLE?
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to get others to think and feel and act for us; sometimes,
like Golyadkin, we try to clothe ourselves in an
omnipotent other self, a self we could have been or
secretly believe we someday still will be, a self who is free
of the painful awareness of just those limitations which
define our boundaries and make us who we are.480
Before Doctor Rutenspitz carts Golyadkin off to the asylum,
Golyadkin, scanning the attendees at the party, sees “[a] whole procession
of identical Golyadkins . . . bursting loudly in at every door.”481 Noting
that everyone is Golyadkin, Dostoevsky compels his readers to see not
some peculiar anomaly, but rather just the normative self. The novel
forces the readers to examine doubly both Golyadkin’s “struggle against
deep urges,” as well as their own and to endure that all too familiar
“painful awareness” of their “limitations.”482 Like it or not, the readers
meld with Golyadkin and his fate becomes their own.
The novel began with Golyadkin meeting his double; when he “wanted
to scream, [he] could not.”483 In the end, Golyadkin succeeds at emitting
that blood-curdling shriek while being whisked away.484
Doctor
Rutenspitz’s “stern and dreadful . . . sentence” does not merely exile
Golyadkin from society, but also strips him of the power to make his own
choices and extinguishes his human dignity.485 To make matters worse, the
readers entertain the disturbing prospect of a wrongful conviction. Even
Golyadkin’s own concession, that “[he] had felt this coming on for a long
time,” does not truly persuade the readers that banishment is kind or
appropriate.486 The same is true of the results in the mental capacity cases
that divest testators of their testamentary freedom without proof that their
take on reality is bizarre or clearly implausible.
480
Rosenthal, supra note 4, at 83.
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 142.
482
Rosenthal, supra note 4, at 83.
483
DOSTOEVSKY, supra note 2, at 44.
484
Id. at 144.
485
Id.
486
Id.
481